Backwater Ops: Demon Hunters
by Hieda no Akyuu
Summary: Alternate universe of GF. Sangvis Ferri is finally eradicated, but the T-Dolls who've survived and can still fight remain in active duty, rented out by G&K to bidders willing to pay for their premium mercenary services. Walther WA-2000 is regarded as one of G&K's elite - officially named First Echelon, but more commonly and simply known as the Demon Hunters.
1. Bottle of Jack

Brushing my hair out of my eyes, I ease myself down on an old plastic folding chair at the corner of a plastic folding desk. There are a lot of bottles here, scattered across the table in clumps. Far more than what the average man can drink...but at the moment, only the one with the label called "Jack Daniel's" intrigues me.

I reach over and pull the Jack Daniel's over while my eyes search for a suitable glass into which I can pour the liquor and help myself. The lighting is dim, as you'd expect of a place like this. No surprise - there's only a pair of incandescent lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on little more than glorified pieces of string. Incandescent in this current year? What a joke.

The music that's blasting into the room is annoying. What the hell is this noise? Do people really dance to this noise pollution when they're listening to nothing but digital scrapes and beeping that amount to nothing more than nails against a cyber chalkboard? God, I don't want to live on this planet sometimes.

Finally managing to find a glass that isn't already somewhat filled to varying amounts with a wide assortment of other liquors or one that hasn't been slobbered all over, I pour myself a glass of Jack. Unfortunately for me, there is no ice to accompany it. I suppose I'll just have to rely on myself for a chilled drink tonight. Either way, I take a sip - and the nicely smoky and vanilla zest immediately seep into my taste buds. Sinatra Select...at least they had good taste. It really is too bad there is no ice at hand, from what I can tell.

This - _music -_ is starting to feel like it's ripping out my nerves from my brain. Drawing one of my AMT Hardballer Longslides from its left hip holster, I lazily half-aim and squeeze the trigger at the stereo riding the top of a wall shelf dead ahead, and the large P-47 Custom .45 Suppressor spits out a sharp _pfft!_ that echoes through the room harshly, though nowhere near as badly as if I were to fire an unsuppressed shot. That one shot cleanly knocks the stereo out, plunging the room into natural silence - a much better ambience than that trash that people call electronic dance music.

As I sit and savor my scavenged glass of Jack in wonderful, sweet silence, I produce my phone from the inner pocket of my black and gold jacket. My phone greets me when I hold it up somewhat to unlock it, lighting up its screen that shows me a picture of a mezzo violin. 0209 hours, 22/05/18. God, the lighting in this room is so bad that my own phone provides more than half the normal visibility at the moment. Unlocking the screen simply by holding my left index finger against the back sensor, I thumb in a phone number and bring it up to my left ear, letting the familiar but still always as annoying buzz of a dial rattle my eardrum.

The dial goes on for some time. Usually she doesn't take this long to pick up, but she's always got some excuse to be busy. I remember getting angry at her before whenever she failed to pick up my calls within reasonable time, but by now this has happened frequently enough to the point where I don't consider it all that worth it to get worked up over something so trivial as this. Though, I would never admit that to anyone.

My left foot nonchalantly taps lightly against the side of the violin case on the floor next to my pathetic excuse of a chair. I thought I would have needed it tonight, but then I realized that it was just easier for me to walk inside this place without it, so it ended up being more of an obligation than an asset. But I would never call it an obligation...

 _"Hello, 47 ~ how's it going?"_

This girl...

"Warlord, be advised, site is secure. Requesting cleanup," I sigh quietly, sipping on some more Jack.

 _"Already!? But you called me saying that you reached the site fifteen minutes ago!"_

I snort under my breath.

"You get what you pay for," I tell her, swirling the Jack in my glass around a bit. "I'd like to remind you that I am the best. So, I cost more. This is natural, no?"

 _"Yep! What, you think Overlord forgot that already?"_

Scowling, I roll my eyes a little.

 _"Oh, and, I guess I shouldn't even really ask you this, but did you secure the package?"_

"Affirmative, package is also secure."

 _"Al~righty, just gonna send over a cleanup crew to your site aaaaannd - done! Report back to base, and I'll have some ice cream for you when you get back, mkay?"_

My ears perk up a little at the sound of ice cream. I can't stop myself from wondering if it's chocolate.

"I'm a mercenary, not a grade-schooler with a sweet tooth. Please stop treating me with such disrespect," I grumble.

 _"Aww, c'mon, 47, it's alright to admit that you like chocolate ice cream ~ no one's ever gonna find out about it, right? Well, except for everyone at base, hahah - "_

I cut the call and pocket my phone. I'm very tempted to hurl the phone as hard as I can across the room, but I know Overlord will charge me for that, as that would be considered deliberate destruction of company equipment. So unfortunately, that isn't an option to me.

Taking my own sweet time with this glass of Jack, I get the most enjoyment out of the liquor since I can't take the bottle back with me; it's strict company policy to not take anything from the sites that we're assigned to clear that isn't marked for extraction. And I, as the model T-Doll, can't afford to let my reputation slip. Not a single mistake, not a single slip-up. My work is perfect, clean, and quiet. As they say, a good mercenary is feared by many - but an exceptional mercenary is unknown.

I finally finish my glass of Jack Daniel's. I haven't had the Sinatra brand in God knows how long - I'd love to buy a bottle of it again sometime, now that seeing one here has refreshed my memory of it. It hurts to leave the rest of the bottle behind, as it's still got plenty of liquor left, but I console myself by recognizing that I can always go out and grab my own bottle if I want to. And I'll probably do just that in the near future.

Setting down the glass on the table, I get up from my chair and pick up the violin case that I've set down next to me while I was seated to exit the room, which is the basement of an old run-down six-story building that used to be an apartment building in Los Angeles, only no one's lived here for about twenty years. As I walk through the room, I step past - and in some cases over - a total of nine bodies, bodies of men dressed in various street clothes, clothes that would give them the look of gangbangers the moment they stepped foot outside of this building. I feel the slippery touch of blood on the floor against the bottoms of my boots, and when I pass the first such body, I eye the pair of tracker knives jutting out of the man's upper thighs, impaled at angles that would sever their femoral arteries, before I walk up the stairs and step outside into the starless night of the Los Angeles skyline.

My custom Yamaha V-MAX is waiting for me, gallantly as always, and as the moon is out tonight, the moonlight splashes brilliantly onto the sleek steel of the motorcycle. Wearing the violin case behind my back like a messenger bag, I pull out the pair of Cutler & Gross aviators that've been riding the middle of my collar just above my red necktie, set them on as I swing my leg over my vehicle, and rev the engine to life with my black and gold-gloved hands.

 _"All the good girls you take out for dinner, but all the bad girls you take out for liquor - "_

With my driving playlist active and rocking my ears, I drive out of the dilapidated parking lot.

Nothing beats a night drive...


	2. Cigarettes by Night

Setting down my violin case against the foot of the queen-size hotel bed, I immediately start stripping off my gloves, then my coat, then my white dress shirt, and then my red ascot, and then my shoes, thighhighs, underwear, and my red hairband and toss them all onto the bed, one by one, before heading straight into the shower.

For a full fifteen minutes - I even time myself so that I don't waste even more time in the shower, because I will if I'm left to my own devices - I stand here underneath the showerhead that doesn't let out enough water for my liking. But I'm not in the mood tonight to complain about a stupid showerhead, so as usual, I let the water drench my long byzantium hair and the rest of my body, though at a slower pace than I'd like.

Now that I have the time to think and genuflect, I haven't been in that kind of a mood in a year.

Standing in the shower like this is a good way for me to soft-reset my mental facilities. Just like an eight-year-old computer whose performance worsens exponentially over time until something happens that causes them to freeze up and/or shut down if they aren't properly shut down or put on sleep mode manually, I've become the same way...with the only difference being that I am not eight years old. At least, not yet. I don't know if I will ever reach that age, but statistically, I don't see that happening.

After fifteen minutes, with my internal timer jolting me out of my stillness underneath the showerhead, I go about showering like a normal person: body wash, shampoo, conditioner. As I'm carefully washing my long hair, I gaze down at the bathtub in which the showerhead is located while the water seeps into them; as a T-Doll, my eyes can be open in situations where normal people might not be able to, such as showering. The sight of the bathtub reminds me of the fact that I once liked to take long baths.

It's not that that isn't the case anymore; it's just that my memories of the times when I liked long baths have decayed to the point where I'm not sure if I feel the same about them anymore. Though, I suppose if someone were to point out that those two things are actually the same, I wouldn't be able to refute that.

After my shower is done, I take another fifteen minutes drying my hair. I use a few tricks that DSR-50 taught me in drying my hair; without her, I'd easily be spending over half an hour. DSR knows a lot about beauty care; back when we were still in active service, I always consulted her for things about skin care and hair care - _especially_ hair.

I miss DSR. Well, not just her, but...given that I'm drying my hair with the hotel's hairdryer, which isn't even as strong as I'd like it to be, DSR is the first one to come to mind. I make a mental note to myself to never book a room in this hotel ever again. Over a hairdryer, yes, I know, I don't make the best decisions sometimes.

After I'm done drying my hair, I turn on the flatscreen TV and set it to the FX channel where it's showing a movie about a guy fighting on the wing of an airplane or something. I'm not actually watching, though; rummaging through a side pocket of my violin case, I pull out a small circular target-like board with a gel padding to stick it against the wall next to my hotel room door. I return to my violin case to then pull out a pack of Caster, a pack of steel-studded playing cards, and a fresh cigarette lighter that I purchased from a 7-11 convenience store just before checking in.

Armed with these nightly necessities while still dressed in nothing but my bathrobe, I sit at the desk and light up a cigarette to put in between my lips while I pull over the ashtray. I made sure to book a smoking room specifically for this reason in case I felt like having a cigarette when I came back from my assignment tonight; I may as well take advantage of it. So I kill some time sitting in my chair with a lit cigarette in my mouth, absentmindedly listening to the movie in the background while tossing the steel-studded playing cards at the target that I've placed on the wall, the cards slapping against the memory gel as they dart out of my left hand.

Once all 52 cards are sticking out the memory gel like needles on a porcupine, I put my cigarette on the ashtray so that I can head back to my coat and pull out my Hardballers so that I can clean them. Stripping them down, I also grab the cleaning kit from my violin case and meticulously clean out the residual gunpowder grime, still smoking all the while. At some point, it hits me that I probably should have cleaned my pistols first, and _then_ took a shower. Makes me wonder if I shouldn't pay a visit to the Repair Station when I return to Fort Detrick for some mental calibrations...

After completing maintenance, I put the Hardballers back together in less than six seconds apiece and snatch them both up off the desk, aiming them over at the card-studded target. I analyze my snap-aim: my left hand almost overshot the target, while my right hand is on point. I need to practice aim with my left hand, it seems - despite being right-handed and being right-eye dominant, I make it a habit to practice on both sides. In the old days of war, fortune favored the bold, but now, it favors the prepared...or so FAL told me. And she at least has a point with that.

Pressing the safeties on my pistols, I set them down on the desk and head over to the window, where they open up to a small little balcony that overlooks the streets below, which are a ways down, given that this is the seventh floor. I'm well aware that I've yet to change out of the bathrobe that I've kept on ever since I got out of the shower, and if this were before a year ago, I definitely would have never done this.

I don't really give a shit anymore, though. Even if someone were to see me, which is unlikely in the first place given the layout of the city in this area and the fact that it's now almost four in the morning, they wouldn't ever find out anything about me. And if they did, I would personally see to it that they forgot whatever they managed to learn about me, through any means necessary.

My dull red eyes wander up to the sky, peering up at the tiny moon in the sky. There aren't even any stars for me to gaze upon here...why does light pollution have to be a thing? Why can't a girl look up at the sky to see the stars these days? Is that so wrong? This planet sucks...at least having the moon out tonight is something, as it helps me relax, even if it's only for a little bit. But as with all things, my moongazing must end, and I retreat into my room and close and lock the window to get ready for bed.

Putting out my cigarette in the ashtray, turning off the TV, and washing my face and brushing my teeth, I carefully fold up the bathrobe that's hidden my bare body and set it on the counter of the sink so that the cleaning lady can see it easily for laundry. I also take my clothes and drape them over the chair so that I can wear them tomorrow in the morning later today, and before I slip into my bed, I kneel down next to my violin case to open it up.

My pride and joy, the scopeless Walther WA-2000, with its polished wooden and steel chassis, sits snugly inside, peeking back out at me from inside its own cozy daytime bed. But as tonight I have a whole bedroom to myself, I pull it out from the case and bring it with me into my bed, shutting off the lamp light next to me and tucking myself in with my sniper rifle close to my chest, over my left breast. With the light out, I snuggle with my rifle, pressing its cold wooden sides against my tired exoskeleton that humans call skin, setting my internal alarm clock to go off in exactly four hours.

Just before I fall asleep, I feel a prickle on the back of my right hand, as if something is being lightly branded into it. Even though I already know what it is, I still open my right eye to glance down at my hand underneath the sheets.

Staring back at me in the darkness is a glowing red symbol that depicts an unnervingly realistic skull flanked by two pistols, similar to a skull and crossbones, and a long rifle down through the middle behind everything else.

A lovely reminder that I am one of G&K's cream of the crop, what Mr. Kryuger and Kalina call the First Echelon...

...and what the rest of G&K calls the Demon Hunters.


	3. Demon Hunters

On June 6th, 2010, an incident that's only known as the North Island Incident to those who know of it occurred. Not much is known about it, and what is known of it, only a few select individuals scattered around the world know.

What I know is that a team of scientists and engineers working on a highly classified military R&D project for the United States military was attacked in their main facility in Okinawa, Japan. Apparently it was a project that was nearly a decade in the making, and they had made enough progress to come close to producing their first batch of samples of whatever product they had been working on, until the attack occurred and destroyed it almost in its entirety.

Some of the research that those scientists and engineers produced was salvaged by wetwork teams sent in by the Americans to recover anything that might have survived. What they managed to scrape out of the ruins of that base was taken with them back to the United States to be finished under top secret conditions and isolated locations to ensure that the unnamed project could be fulfilled as was intended.

And when fulfilled, the salvaged remnants of the original project gave the United States the means to produce androids, or machines that emulate the human body to perfection in all of its aspects. They were codenamed Tactical Dolls - T-Dolls.

Up until this point, this is only what I know of that project. Or it's more accurate to say that this is what I'm allowed to know.

Just as the United States completed their work on T-Doll production, however, reports began to come in with allegations of the sightings of androids suspiciously similar to the ones they were working on - heavily armed and wearing sinister purple and black armor, with eerie pale skin. The first such sighting was made on May 8th, 2014. They were seen operating mainly in third-world countries, in the countries that were known to house bases for one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world at the time, the Advanced Administration of the Holy War. Once the United States concluded that the A.A.H.W. was the terrorist organization responsible for the fielding and production of these rogue androids, who'd been seen calling themselves Sangvis Ferri after the private military company tasked with their production and upkeep by the A.A.H.W., they mobilized quickly to counter the threat before the rest of the world were made privy to the existence of T-Dolls.

But if the United States were to produce T-Dolls of their own and field them, they would risk leaking the existence of T-Dolls to the world, and if that were to happen, the world would assume that the United States were responsible for the creation of T-Dolls, and America's reputation on the world stage would tank - as if it weren't doing that already. So rather than produce them on American soil, the United States awarded a T-Doll production contract to a private military company with whom they had close ties and was run by former American military personnel called the Grifon & Kryuger Security Firm. G&K would produce T-Dolls in facilities scattered around the world and would be responsible for their operations, maintenance, and upkeep, with orders issued to the head of G&K by clandestine superiors deep within the United States government, and those orders would then be filtered down through G&K's chains of command to field T-Dolls wherever and whenever they were needed.

The war that ensued between the G&K T-Dolls and the Sangvis Ferri T-Dolls never had an official name. Perhaps fitting, because the rest of the world never came know of it. It shall forever remain invisible text in the book called Modern History, known only to those who have the means to see the text buried underneath the public eye.

To those who do know it, however, it was simply known as the Girls' Frontline. Though I hesitate to call it a frontline at all.

The Girls' Frontline lasted for about two years, but eventually G&K triumphed, and with the help of American special forces, their T-Dolls was able to track down the last forces of the Sangvis Ferri and exterminate them completely. The A.A.H.W. was also destroyed around the same time by those same American special forces, and the Sangvis Ferri threat was neutralized before it ever got a chance to become a threat to the world.

Following the Girls' Frontline, the United States discontinued their contract to G&K, effectively terminating their right to produce more T-Dolls, but since it would be a waste to simply scrap the T-Dolls who'd survived, G&K was allowed to continue T-Doll operations for private business matters, as they are a private military company, after all, but under careful American surveillance to make sure that more Sangvis Ferri-like insurrections wouldn't happen again in the future. G&K agreed to this wholeheartedly, because despite the immense amount of power that the T-Dolls gave them, T-Doll production was not only extremely expensive but also logistically nightmarish; bleeding-edge android technology came at a price so heavy that G&K was almost bankrupt by the time the Girls' Frontline ended. By being able to keep the T-Dolls who'd survived and use them for private operations, G&K would at least have a chance to rebuild themselves back up and avoid total bankruptcy.

Under one final condition, however: G&K was required to offer the surviving T-Dolls a choice between assimilating into civilian life or continuing with mercenary service. If the T-Dolls wished, they could give up their lives of war and conflict and live out the rest of their days in peace, though they would have to allow the American government to maintain surveillance over them for security reasons. If they chose to continue their services, who knows when they would get this choice again, if ever.

Not a single surviving T-Doll chose to stop fighting.

* * *

Officially, the Demon Hunters are a squad of the most battle-proven T-Dolls of the G&K Security Firm. It is a title given to those who have demonstrated exceptional and outstanding performance in battle, performance that goes far and above the expectations of our superiors.

But to call us a squad would be misleading. Rather, it's a title - a title given to the T-Dolls in whom G&K placed special trust in to carry out orders that needed to be completed, no matter what. No matter the cost, no matter the implications, no matter the circumstances.

It doesn't necessarily mean that we're the most skilled, or even the most battle-hungry, though not coincidentally, everyone who's been a Demon Hunter has tended to be the top of their respective squadrons and companies. All it means is that we will do what we're told, when we're told, and without question.

It was formed at the start of the second year against Sangvis Ferri, after a series of devastating losses against them. Morale was low at the time among G&K forces, with plenty of separatist mentalities, and there were even rumors of mutinies. G&K needed results to show the Americans that progress was being made despite the losses, and the Demon Hunters were formed. Ostensibly, as you may infer from what was said earlier, it was to motivate the T-Dolls - the Demon Hunters would receive orders only from the top, be able to operate on their own and with their own rules, pick their own squads and support, and have any and all equipment at their disposal. While all of this was in fact true, the truth behind the original conception of the Demon Hunters was that G&K needed T-Dolls to carry out what were essentially suicide runs, tasks that very few T-Dolls were willing to undertake because it would mean almost certain death, or, if you were captured by the Sangvis Ferri, something worse than death, and G&K made this intention very clear to those who were considered qualified to join the Demon Hunters. Luckily for them, by that point in the war, there were quite a few T-Dolls willing to do just that.

Times have changed now, obviously. The end of the Girls' Frontline means that the extremities on which the Demon Hunters were first organized are no longer necessary, so the prestige of the Demon Hunters was finally able to be actualized - but the original purpose still remains. If we are called to complete our Final Orders, as they're called, we will do so without question, regardless of what happens to us.

Now, we carry out missions given to us by G&K, who's made their services known to the corporate underworld, hidden safely away from the public eye while offering wealthy families, corporations, even entire governments special mercenary services that they can't find elsewhere, and naturally we Demon Hunters are tasked with the most dangerous and the most demanding ones. The rest of the T-Dolls also work in similar lines of business, but they oftentimes juggle desk work with logistics and frontline duty, while our work is exclusively reserved for frontline work - or, I should say, backwater operations.

There are five currently active members of the Demon Hunters: DSR-Precision GmbH DSR-50, FN FAL, TDI Vector, Franchi SPAS-12, and Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen WA-2000. While we sometimes collaborate with one another for certain assignments, for the most part all of us operate alone.

There is no Demon Hunter who has carried out her Final Order and lived. So considering the fact that we will all die in the line of duty one day, it's better for all of us that way.


	4. Iced Coffee

Quietly sipping up some iced coffee, I stand at the corner of an adequately busy intersection, one that's not too busy, but has consistent traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian. This is my favorite kind of intersection; there's a sense of normalcy that instills calmness in whoever beholds it, that everything is business as usual, and that there is nothing out of the ordinary. Progress is being made, and that is how things should be.

Behind me is a small little coffee shop from which I've purchased my iced coffee; though, just like this intersection, it's moderately occupied with customers who enjoy their own coffees or other assorted beverages in the afternoon sun or inside the shop itself. I'm not sitting amongst them, however; I'm leaning against the base of one of the intersection lights, very close to the edge of the sidewalk, to the point where I could reach out my left foot and reach the cars passing by.

I don't know why I decided to buy an iced coffee today. After what feels like a lifetime of having only three choices of beverage as a T-Doll, those three choices being stale water, specially manufactured high-performance energy drinks made by G&K for our consumption during the Girls' Frontline that tasted like a mix of mint and cat piss, and alcohol, iced coffee certainly seems quite out of the ordinary. I suppose having a rendezvous point right next to a coffee shop was what did it - and my own curiosity as to why people would clamor for coffee. And since my partner hasn't arrived yet, I had the time to spare to go in and buy something, though I just chose something simple since I don't know how to order coffee.

Lost in thought again, as I tend to be when I'm not putting bullets into people, I push off the big intersection light and wander slowly over to the open alley to the side of the coffee shop, a foot traffic alley that leads shortly down to a small corner mall and a liquor store underneath a public parking building. This alley has a small fountain and various rectangular marble structures that serve as perfect seats for weary passersby, so I help myself and stand my violin case up against one of these stone seats and sit down on it, facing the fountain in front of me while slowly drinking more iced coffee.

Ugh, waiting for her to get here is pissing me off.

Waiting in general tilts me off the edge of the planet. We T-Dolls were constructed to be exacting in everything we do, which makes sense, since our brains are built like computers, so in the context of the war, if there was any waiting to be done, usually that meant that something in the mission had gone wrong, whether it be another ally squad going MIA, only to be found all KIA from a Sangvis Ferri ambush somewhere, or that some objective that was supposed to have been completed hadn't been. Waiting almost always meant bad news, and we all lived with that knowledge for two years.

Might not sound like a long time, but have enough of your friends and comrades die and two years can feel like two thousand.

Obviously times have changed now; the war is gone and blah blah whatever. But even for us T-Dolls some things don't change. When they built us, G&K initially thought that we were closer to machines than humans. That's what they told us and programmed us to believe, so we believed them. I guess we all know better now.

"Good afternoon, Walther."

A firm grip lightly bites my right shoulder as the words slip through my byzantium hair and into my ears.

"You're growing soft, laddie. Definitely not the Walther I knew two years ago," the voice to whom the hand that's gripped my shoulder belongs continues on, and I can sense a bit of sarcasm in it, as it customary with this particular voice. I lower my iced coffee to turn my head up to my partner, a girl wearing a large black coat and a black pleated skirt. But when I look up at her, she swiftly looks past my face and down at what I'm holding in my hands and contorts her face with confusion. "Drinkin' bloody iced coffee? Who are you and what have you done with the real Walther?!"

Frowning at her joke, I turn away rather grumpily and continue sucking on my straw for some more iced coffee.

"I don't always drink Jack, if that's what you're implying," I snap a little back up at my partner, who chuckles quite vigorously before taking a seat next to me. Luckily for us, this stone seat can just barely fit the two of us. "It's summer, so I decided to get something that'd cool me down a little. And since we were waiting here and there's the shop right next to us, I figured that I might as well. And besides, you're wearing a coat like that in the middle of summer?"

Welrod rolls her eyes, making a dismissive gesture with her right gloved hand.

"This city's somethin' else, I tell ya," she scoffs under her breath. "Normally I'd walk around in the usual, but can't do that now with how much foot traffic there is. I can feel people starin' at me." Welrod shudders a bit. "You know how I feel about walking around in the middle of the day anyway."

I snicker at her testimony. "What, did you think you could just walk around in a big city like this and get away with having no one ogle at you?"

"Kryuger never told us to watch out for things like this!" Welrod defends herself adamantly, pursing her lips at me, but she releases the pressure that she's storing between them as she assumes a more concerned countenance. "But it's not just me; I don't think any one of us really expected to have to deal with issues like that. It would'a been nice if we'd been debriefed about things like that..."

"Not like they could have prepared us for everything once we went merc," I point out.

"That's true. Not like it's a big matter anyhow."

Indeed, the problem of not being self-aware of our own physical attractiveness. Such a quality never mattered with us T-Dolls, especially not when you never knew if you'd come back with half your face missing from an enemy anti-materiel bullet or a rocket pod. And our enemies certainly did not care for it either; they either only took us prisoner or killed us; there was no in between. But now that our adversaries are human, and frequently male, we've been rudely awakened to more of the ugly side of the world, another layer of depth that we must learn if we want to continue serving as T-Dolls. Some of us have grown accustomed to it faster than others; I know DSR has had a few missions in which she used her own beauty as a weapon.

I still prefer the old-fashioned way of shooting people.

"Rgh...didn't bring my gaspers..." Welrod grumbles, fumbling around on her body to try to figure out where her pack of cigarettes went. "You got any on ya?"

Frowning at her but still reaching down to my violin case, I pull out my own pack and flick out a single cigarette for her to withdraw, which she does; she produces her own lighter in the meantime and lights up.

"Forgot yours somewhere?" I ask nonchalantly.

"Must've...I guess I'm losing my touch too," Welrod sighs, exhaling cigarette smoke with a big puff. "And I'm fresh off a defrag..."

"How long ago did you get one?"

"Not even two weeks. And here I am forgetting where my ciggies went." Welrod takes another long drag on her cigarette. "Won't be long before I start forgettin' where my beauties went off to, either."

She's talking about her pistols, by the way.

"It's not just you," I murmur, thoughtfully sipping on some more iced coffee, though I'm almost done with it at this point. "Everyone's been like that."

"Oh, I know. And it's getting worse." Welrod points her cigarette at me without looking at me. "If we'd exited service, then perhaps our problems could be overlooked as quirks."

"We'll just have to work around them, then."

"But at what point will that stop working?"

"Not sure, but that's why we're still here, isn't it? To find out."

Welrod rubs her brow. "Yes and no...? I can't say that I'm quite keen on findin' out when my memory starts to utterly fail me. Same for you, I'm sure you don't want to find out when you'll somehow get alcohol poisoning."

"Not like we can do much about it if Kalina and her team haven't been able to find a way to debug us."

"Yes, it's quite sad, actually."

Welrod glances sideways at me.

"How are things between you and Springfield?" she asks in a noticeably lower voice.

I lower my iced coffee slowly, since there's nothing left in it to drink except for a few shrunken cubes of ice. I don't answer Welrod.

"...I see," Welrod softly trails off. "Forget I asked, then."

Rummaging through her coat pocket, she produces a phone and turns it on to show me a picture on the screen.

"Kalina's found our next target," she mutters, still smoking her cancer stick; the picture shows a man with a clean-shaven face and a distinct jawline walking down a street somewhere. "The information you obtained from last night's assignment's traced him to San Francisco, up north, or at least that's where he should be."

"What's our timeframe looking like?"

"We leave tonight and we scour the city right away as soon as we land. Grizzly, FAL, SPAS, and G36-C will assist."

"Formation?"

"Pairs. Grizzly and FAL, SPAS and G36-C, and you and me."

"San Francisco's a big city; you think just the six of us can cover it in one night?"

"And that's what this is for."

Welrod shakes her phone in front of me to get my attention, and looking down at it, I notice that her phone screen's moved off the picture of our target and instead shows a black screen with digital white circles bubbling inside.

"Whoever's our client must want this target badly," I remark as I put my hand palm-down against the phone screen. A holographic panel blooms into my heads-up display, automatically connecting me to HAVOC, a comms satellite built by G&K that's served with us ever since the beginning of the Girls' Frontline. It's a running joke among us surviving T-Dolls that HAVOC was the first T-Doll G&K built and the last one that they'll ever have in active service. "Alright, connected."

"We're cleared to use HAVOC to survey the city; however, for obvious reasons, its weapons systems are offline," Welrod states. "Kalina and her team will use HAVOC to assist us; if they locate the target first, they'll point us to his location; otherwise, we find the target and detain him."

"Estimated resistance?"

"Not applicable; this bloke's unarmed and not dangerous."

"Must be a cash cow, then," I chuckle, and so does Welrod.

"Easy money. We'll be havin' caviar and Cuban cigars tomorrow night, I tell ya," Welrod cackles a little bit before getting back up, crushing her cigarette butt in her left hand before looking around for a public trash can. "We still have a bit of time before our flight; want something to eat? I know a few restaurants in this area, but I hope you're alright with spicy ramen."

Spicy ramen...my ears perk up a little when I hear these words being uttered.

"Sure. It'll be payment for that cigarette I gave you."

"A bowl of ramen is the same as a cigarette? In what world is _that_ true?" Welrod wonders aloud.

"In ours."

Laughing together, we set off to go find a suitable ramen joint.


	5. Skyline

**22:12:39.  
San Francisco, California, United States.  
Assigned: Walther, Welrod, Grizzly, FAL, SPAS-12, G36-C.  
April 17th, 2017.**

 _"So I take it that from this chopper ride, we're not going to search the city down at ground zero with the others?"_

 _"Sudden change of plans, apparently. They want your eyes up in the sky."_

 _"Understandable, I've got the best pair of eyes on this side of the planet."_

 _"Who's the other best, then?"_

 _"DSR."_

 _"Hah, should'a known."_

A Bell 206L-1 LongRanger II civilian helicopter is flying us to the Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in downtown San Francisco, directly from the Oakland International Airport; the San Francisco International Airport is too busy for our liking, so we were flown to the more discrete Oakland International to catch this helicopter that waited for us there to get to the city. The mesmerizing, illuminated San Franciscan skyline sprawls beneath us as the helicopter steadily navigates its way through the air to the correct helipad in this skyline.

 _"Why the sudden change, though?"_ I ask Welrod, who's sitting directly in front of me. Both of us are wearing helicopter headsets that ordinary people would need to be able to speak to each other without having the rotors blare over everything, but it's not like we need them. _"Mission details said that there's barely any resistance; all we need is this one guy and detain him. Are they expecting him to put up resistance, now?"_

 _"That I can't confirm. I've tried, but I wasn't told why,"_ Welrod shakes her head.

 _"That's weird, usually they'd always be on top of intel, and Kalina's always given us more than enough intel to work with..."_

 _"Oh, then perhaps I should have told you sooner that this isn't Kalina supplying us intel for this assignment."_

I narrow my eyes at my partner in surprise.

 _"It's not Kalina? Then who is it?"_ I ask.

 _"Kyruger."_

 _"Uh, wait, why's Kryuger doing intel? He hasn't done that ever since the Frontline closed."_

Welrod simply shrugs.

 _"Your guess is as good as mine, laddie."_

 _"Two minutes, ladies!"_ the helicopter pilot interrupts us on a one-way comms line to us, meaning that he couldn't hear the conversation the two of us were having just now.

 _"Something already feels off about this assignment, then, if Kryuger of all people's working intel for us,"_ I murmur broodingly, and Welrod nods in agreement.

 _"It's why I've been on edge this whole time. You've noticed it, right?"_

That I have; ever since Welrod received an update to our mission profile before leaving Los Angeles International, she's been looking tenser than usual, but given that it's Welrod, that could have easily been chalked up to being her default expression. However, having worked with her for many jobs now, we've gotten to know one another quite well, and I can tell when she's more nervous about something than is the norm.

 _"Then more importantly, do the others know? Grizzly, G36-C?"_ I ask Welrod.

 _"Yes, Kryuger's already informed them. They'll all be on guard."_

 _"Wanna bet on how many firefights we'll have tonight?"  
_

 _"Sure, I'll put down twenty."_

 _"How many?"_

 _"Three."_

I chuckle unceremoniously. _"I see that our prim and proper British lady demands that blood be spilled."_

 _"Not so much bloodlust and more pessimism and doom-saying,"_ Welrod mutters back grimly. _"Walther, do realize that we are operating in another big city again. The last time G &K had a city operation, it almost ended in catastrophe."_

I nod back; she's referring to the Baltimore incident where several of our T-Dolls were assigned to track down and raid a few hidden warehouses that were allegedly housing smuggled contraband, mainly illegal drugs and narcotics, but the local gang that was shipping them into the country got wind of their arrival and fought back ferociously, and the ensuing gunfights almost spilled out to the rest of the city.

 _"Ten seconds!"_ our pilot reminds us one last time.

 _"Won't happen with us,"_ I reply to my partner. _"Demon Hunters don't let things get out of hand, you know that."_

Welrod just gives me a quick _hmph_ and takes off her headset, as I do, and we hang them on their respective racks and toss open the helicopter door just as the LongRanger touches down swiftly onto the top helipad of the Salesforce Tower. Welrod hops out first, and I follow after her, carrying my violin case, and I hold my left hand over my forehead to shield my eyes from my whipping byzantium hair as the helicopter takes off as quickly as it's come to fly away.

"HAVOC's been updated; our target's likely to be to our north," Welrod informs me as we head over to the north side of the tower. Our entire eastern flank overlooks the San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, meaning that it's one entire direction that we don't need to worry about, for the most part.

As Welrod stands by the edge and peers into the northern skyline with the small pair of high-powered binoculars that she's brought with her tied to the back of her waist, I begin setting up shop. Setting down my violin case, I toss it open and pull out my sniper rifle so that I can adjust the scope for the proper distances that I'm presented with here and pull on my pistol harness that carries my pair of AMT handguns for close-quarters combat.

"Nothing out of the ordinary so far," Welrod reports. "Grizzly, this is Welrod, what's your status?"

 _"We've just arrived at Jackson Square, proceeding to survey the area,"_ Grizzly responds, and I'm able to hear her response thanks to Welrod tethering my signature to her call. _"How's the skyline looking like?"_

"Too many lights for my liking, but you know me."

Grizzly laughs. _"Yeah, you fucking edgelord. I still think you should dress up as a vampire or something this Halloween, Welrod, remember that."_

"I will do nothing of the sort!"

While Welrod yaps back at her fellow pistol, I aim down sights with my sniper rifle to get a picture of the northern front. After I carefully scan the skyline and as much of ground zero as I can from this angle, I lower my rifle so that I can also analyze the skyline as a whole, unzoomed.

"Skyline secure. Now to let the girls down there flush him out..." I sigh, setting down my WA-2000 with its bipod deployed next to me. I'm tempted to light up a cigarette of my own, but the whipping winds at high altitude on top of the tallest skyscraper in the city won't do me much favors, so I resign myself to waiting after this assignment is complete to enjoy a smoke.

"Aye, if those towers weren't there, we'd have a better view of the potential locations where our target's likely to be..." Welrod nods, opting to remain standing next to me. "Now...we wait."

"What about G36-C and SPAS?"

"Didn't call them yet."

"Then I will."

Having been connected to HAVOC already before we left Los Angeles, I access SPAS's callsign; since we're using HAVOC to assist us, we can use the satellite's server as a means to connect to everyone else who's also connected to the satellite; normally we'd have to have each other's callsigns established beforehand, but the satellite allows us to contact each other remotely like this without ever having to meet up prior to a mission, which is quite convenient. Once I download SPAS's signature, I begin a call to her.

 _"Buonasera, buonasera ~ !"_ SPAS greets me with her ever bouncy and hearty words. _"It's been a while, Walther! We should_ really _get a bite to eat together sometime, you know? Mmmm ~ !"_

I hear her chewing on something, and because of the nature of our telecommunications, I can hear all the exquisite details of her teeth chewing and squishing and grinding against whatever it is that she's eating. And it's positively disgusting.

"What in the _fuck_ are you eating _now_ , SPAS?" I groan loudly.

 _"Oops - !_ Scusami _,_ scusami _, G36-C and I saw a Five Guy's here and I just_ had _to try out their burgers! Grizzly told me to look out for one because she said I'd love it, and I do! Mmm, mmm ~ "_

I'm already facepalming hard while SPAS is justifying her chewing, and Welrod is snickering endlessly because even though she's not part of the call, she knows exactly what SPAS is saying. So I connect to G36-C instead and tether her to the call, which G36-C allows.

"36-C, what the hell? You let SPAS walk into a hamburger restaurant during an assignment?" I groan loudly, still while SPAS is happily chowing on her burger. Her chewing and eating is doubly irritating because it's making _me_ want to go out and eat something, given the fact that neither Welrod and I have eaten anything since our spicy ramen lunch earlier today.

 _"Aaaaaa -_ Das tut mir leid!" G36-C cries back, and I immediately notice that there's a distinct tone of guilt in her voice, and sure enough, I also catch a very soft chewing sound coming from her, too.

" _Verdammt_..." Speaking with a fellow German rifle instinctively makes me switch to my own German too. "You too?"

 _"I-It couldn't be helped, we were both hungry, Walther! A-And...and..."_

"And what?"

 _"A-And I also wanted to try one, too..."_

"You can try one _after_ this assignment, _sheisse!"_

 _"_ _Das tut mir leid...!"_

"Just finish quick and do your job, alright?"

 _"Ja, ja, we will! SPAS, quickly, let's finish here and get back to work..."_

 _"Awww...but one more burger!"_

"SPAS, NO." And I immediately end the call.

"SPAS being SPAS as usual, huh?" Welrod smiles, having gotten a week's worth of entertainment from this two minute call.

"Thank God we do mercenary work now," I grumble. "Remember when she used to binge-eat?"

Welrod shakes her head. "No, but I heard of the horror stories."

"Tch, lucky you. I was in the same echelon when she started that crap."

"Oh dear God. How long did you poor lads go without food?"

"Two hundred and seven hours."

"Bloody hell."

"Yeah, that's why you sometimes hear about the others talking about the two-hundred hour fast, that's what they're referring to."

Welrod at this point decides to take a seat next to me.

"But that's the reason why SPAS is such a heavy eater now, right?" she asks, and I nod, more somberly now, though.

"She got sent out on one mission down to Sri Lanka when the Sangvis Ferri were planning to set up a base down there and redevelop the island into a weapons testing site," I explain. "And she went down there with SAW, PP-90, AK-12, and Garand. I don't know the full details either, but their mission went south, and SAW and PP-90 got KIA, and Garand and AK-12 got captured. SPAS managed to save her and got back to extraction just in time with her, but AK-12 was apparently forced to watch Garand get tortured to death and then had her own eyes get gouged out. SPAS said that it was her fault that their mission failed as badly as it did but no one knows for sure, unless AK-12 herself finally decides to say something about it."

Welrod grimly inspects her pair of bolt-action handguns while I talk.

"I heard that much, about AK-12 not wanting to talk about what happened in Sri Lanka," my partner notes quietly. "You think she ever will say something about it?"

I shake my head.

"I'd worked with her a few times, and I don't think she will. She's too nice for that."

"What about SPAS? You think she's telling the truth, or she's just trying to take the blame for someone else? SPAS's that kinda lad, you know that."

"Yeah, but normally you wouldn't go so far as to develop a stress-eating habit that's _that_ bad just for the sake of taking someone else's responsibility. You'd do that if it really was your own."

"Fair enough."

"And about AK-12, she's too nice for her own good."

"Nice? She seemed rather cold."

"You probably only saw her in combat mode. If you get to know her when she's off duty, you'll understand. Unfortunately, it's her kindness that'll torture SPAS even more, and AK-12 herself doesn't want to admit it."

Stowing her pair of silenced handguns away in her own harness, Welrod gazes straight back at me in the eye.

"I've always wondered, you sure know quite a bit about us T-Dolls," she says.

"I do my best to live up to my name."

At first, Welrod gives me a confused look, but then it clicks with her.

"Hmph, so that's how it is." Welrod gets back up to her feet. "My name better be on there on your list somewhere."

I gaze out to the skyline with her. "Yeah, we'll see."


	6. Dossier

_"2K, Welrod, this is Grizzly, we've located the target."_

"Keep us patched; relay your location," I reply immediately as Welrod and I reflexively bounce into position; I swiftly pick up my sniper rifle and Welrod practically slides on her knees next to me and fishes out her pair of binos to spot me.

 _"He's down by the north docks, the Exploratorium. Do you have LOS?"_

My partner and I both angle our lines of sight towards the north, in the direction of the docks.

"Negative, Grizzly, no LOS, you're on your own," Welrod responds first.

 _"Copy that, figured that'd be the case. FAL, let's go."_

 _"Already tracking him. He's moving quick, we must hurry."_

"Target wasn't dining in some high-rise restaurant somewhere," Welrod scoffs, lowering her binos as our task is more or less made irrelevant. "Wanted some action tonight; s'pose that won't happen."

"Any day with no combat action is a good day to me," I sigh back, not bothering to hide the relief in my voice.

"Become used to mercenary life now, are we?" Welrod smirks.

"Not so much that, but more so that killing people gets old after a while."

"Ah, so you're not like the others, huh."

"Not like Thompson? No, I'm afraid not. That SMG just wants to shoot everything that moves."

Welrod sits down properly, still with a cigarette butt in her mouth, facing me.

"I'm assumin' Tommy's got somethin' screwy with her too?" she asks.

"PC decay. Technically, it's emotional inhibition malfunction, but it's easier to think of it as PC decay." PC stands for "Personality Codex".

"I thought it was AOCD." Welrod's talking about acute obsessive compulsive disorder, a mental disorder common among veteran T-Dolls.

"Initially we thought that was what it was with Thompson, but we had her inspected one day to find out exactly what it was, and it's not AOCD because the bug wasn't in her behavioral processes, but rather in her emotional caches."

Welrod scratches her head. "Blimey, how's that supposed to work?"

"Thompson was one of the few back in the war who actively took stim packs. Remember those?"

At the mention of stim packs, Welrod shudders somewhat.

"Ah shite, how can I forget those? Watched Calico fuckin' off herself over the course 'a five months," the pistol sighs heavily.

I nod with sympathy. "Similar thing happened to Thompson. In her case, the aggression amplifiers in the stim packs caused her brain to produce too much aromatase; normally stim packs don't have any permanent effects if they're used sparingly, but Thompson kept taking them to help her fight off pain from wounds so that she could keep fighting. Eventually, her body produced too much aromatase over a prolonged period of time, and it corrupted several of her codexes. So what ended up happening to her is that whenever Thompson shows any sign of anger or aggression at all, her first reaction is to just shoot whatever it is that's causing her trouble. And if she can't do that, she'll just shoot the nearest person because that's what she's been doing for two years straight. And if she can't do _that_ , she'll just shoot something, anything."

"Huh, interestin'. So as long as she doesn't get pissed off, that problem won't actually be triggered?"

"No. The problem then is, Thompson gets angry _really_ easily."

"Ah, right." Welrod scratches her head irritably. "T-Dolls sure are flimsy, huh."

"We're based off human anatomy. It doesn't surprise me that we have all sorts of problems, just like humans do." I close the lid of my fake violin case over my Walther sniper rifle and lock the clasps. "The only differences are physical. Everything else..."

"...prone to internal failure," Welrod finishes for me.

That response gets a bit of a chuckle out of me. "That's one way to put it."

 _"All callsigns, this is Grizzly,"_ Grizzly's voice alerts every one of us in the area in a low whisper. _"We've got a situation."_

"Go ahead, Grizzly," I immediately respond this time, standing up with my sniper rifle case in my right hand, and Welrod jumps up to her feet with me.

 _"Target is meeting a small group of men, two of them, by the Waterfront restaurant at the north docks...looks like he's sitting down with 'em for a drink or two."_

 _"These men the target is meeting with are suspicious; they're both wearing suits, and they don't appear to be friends with the target,"_ FAL also reports.

I switch frequencies to contact Kalina.

 _"Evenin', Walter! How's the mission going ~ ?"_

"Now's not the time for niceties; Grizzly's reporting that our target's meeting with a pair of men at a restaurant north of Salesforce Tower; these men are suspicious and don't appear to be the target's friends, please advise."

 _"Hmm, let's see, the target is a known hacker, it's possible he's meeting with clients to broker information."_

"That's not how normal hackers operate; they don't just come out in public like this to meet with their clients."

 _"Well, given how much our client's paying for us to eliminate him, he might be an exception. Maybe he's such an exceptional hacker that it doesn't matter if he shows himself in public or not."_

"Or, that he's a major dickhead," Welrod adds.

 _"Either or, whatever fits your fancy, I guess."_

"Roger that." I cut the call with Kalina. "Grizzly, FAL, be advised, those men might be the target's clients, proceed with caution."

 _"Copy that, but we can't make a move here, we have to wait for them to move somewhere else...no, wait, stand by..."_

We wait for Grizzly or FAL to update us on the situation.

 _"Uh, confirmed, targets are exiting the Waterfront, we're tracking them."_

 _"Targets returning to their vehicle. SPAS, C, report."  
_

 _"We're standing on the northern corner of Sue Bierman Park. If they drive down south, we'll be able to track them,"_ SPAS replies. SPAS almost sounds like two different people depending on whether she's eating something or when she's on duty and being serious about it.

 _"Copy your last, we'll track 'em if they drive north. Vehicle is starting up..."_

"Walther, get ready to jump," Welrod warns me quietly, pulling tighter the ends of her black fingerless gloves.

 _"Vehicle is heading north. SPAS, C, try to follow us; use HAVOC to track target vehicle if you need to,"_ Grizzly calls. _"FAL, get on!"_

As we can hear the tail end of Grizzly's motorcycle engine revving to life, Welrod breaks into a run, and I follow closely behind her, and both of us are headed straight for the northern edge of the tower roof. Welrod leaps off the edge with a boost-jump, and I jump right after her and catch her by the ankles as she flings off her black jacket, which bursts into a sort of makeshift parachute. Using the high-altitude winds to guide us, Welrod triangulates the moving position of our targets with the help of HAVOC and glides us thorugh the San Franciscan skyline, weaving in between skyscrapers as we descend slowly to a more manageable height that'll help us keep tabs on our target better.

"You feel heavier than before, Walther!" Welrod calls from above. "You haven't been binging on too much ice cream, have you?"

"I'll have you know that the last time I had chocolate ice cream was five days ago, thank you very much!" I shriek back, feeling my cheeks start to burn somewhat.

"Oh, what a surprise, that's five days longer than I would've thought!"

 _"Shut up, Welrod, I swear to God!"_

We glide through the night like a pair of silent bats, well, Welrod isn't so silent as she roars with laughter for a moment. We make a hard landing on top of a two-story corner shop, and I let go first so that Welrod can have a clean landing. She pinches off the cords of her parachute even before she lands so that when she hits the roof, she hits it running, and together we run across the roofs and leap across them to keep up with the target vehicle. While running, I use HAVOC to locate Grizzly's motorbike, and they're not too far behind the target vehicle; there's still a good degree of traffic, which'll give them cover from being noticed by the target vehicle.

We track our targets to a set of small apartments in southern Russian Hills district, one with a lot of trees growing in it, which differentiates it from the other blocks we've been passing by. The vehicle parks in the parking lot drawn straight into Broadway street, and Welrod and I arrive just in time to see the targets exiting the vehicle and walking towards the apartments on which we stand.

"Targets entering the apartments on our location," I report to the team.

 _"Can you see exactly which apartment they're going into?"_ Grizzly asks.

"I'll take care 'a that."

Stepping up to the plate, Welrod dons her jacket properly and throws the hood over her head, and her image quickly bleeds into the surroundings. Optical camouflage, emergency parachutes...what _can't_ her jacket do?

As I'm standing on the roof of this apartment marveling at Welrod's James Bond-like arsenal of tricks and gadgets that is her jacket, a familiar voice plays in my ears.

 _"Walther, come in."_

Instantly recognizing the gruff Russian voice, I stiffen up a little.

"Reporting, Overlord."

It's Kryuger.

 _"Enabling Demon Hunter protocol, Walther. The client for this assignment has contacted me to provide a few details that he has only entrusted me with, which I will now relay to you. The target possesses a dossier labeled 'PM' in his apartment. Find and secure that dossier before the others find the target. Good hunting, Overlord out."_

Short, concise, and to the point; Mr. Kryuger has not changed one bit throughout all his years. Or, at least, all the years that I've known him.

My Demon Hunter protocol is now in effect. This means that I am to complete my objective with whatever means necessary.

Dropping my violin case where I stand, I draw my dual suppressed Hardballers before dropping down silently to the ground below within the compact apartment complex.

"Walther, I'm Demon Hunting. I'm going in."

 _"Righty-o, rendezvous with me, I'm holding position outside of target's house."_

I track Welrod's signature and arrive at its coordinates, though I don't actually see anything. But Welrod's voice does hiss out at me quietly:

"5455, third door on the right."

Nodding, I round the corner and head to the third door, number 5455. The door has been left ajar, which makes my life easier, and peeking in first, I don't see anyone watching the door, but I do hear voices inside. The target is speaking with the men in suits about something, by the sounds of it.

"...still need, like, another week on it."

"We'll pay you extra to get it done within the week."

"No, I'm sayin', I can't do that. Not 'cause I don't want the money, but 'cause there're problems that I gotta work out, and even if I were ta work on it the whole week, I still wouldn't get it done. It's not that I don't want to, it's because I can't."

"Then we'll find someone better."

"You can't find someone better, I'm the best there is."

A moment of silence.

"Pullin' your guns on me won't do a fuckin' thing if you really care about this, y'know. I'm not lyin' to you fucks, this isn't something that can be finished in just a week."

"Then what's the problem? We need _something_ to report back to our boss."

"It's a psi...ah fuck it, you guys won't understand. Just tell him that the software's still buggy as hell, it's gonna take a while to debug it entirely."

 _"Walther, hurry up, the others'll be here in two minutes,"_ Welrod reminds me urgently.

Acting on this ultimatum, I swiftly push the door open with my left shoulder and stride straight into the apartment, both of my suppressed handguns raised.

A Siberian husky walks around the corner from the small living room, curious to know what this new foreign scent that I exude is, and for a moment, we lock gazes.

Oh my God, it's so cute, I just wanna hug it right now.

"Troy? That's weird, he usually doesn't get up unless - "

"Hold on, you stay here, I'll check."

A pair of soft footsteps, the sound of dress shoes trodding on carpet. I flatten myself quietly against the wall next to the door that leads into the bedrooms, and as soon as the first suited man walks out, I smash the butt of my handgun against the side of his head to knock him out cleanly.

"What was that?"

The second suited man hurries over to investigate the noise that the first guy's made dropping to the floor, and I can hear him flicking the safety off his own pistol over the husky barking a few times. I'm guessing that it's not suppressed like mine are, so I can't let him fire a shot. So instead, I readjust the grip of my Hardballer and poke the man hard in the left eye with the end of my suppressor, and flinching hard, the man lets out a painful yelp, instinctively dropping his gun to the floor. Turning the corner, I grab the guy by the collar and plant my knee into his left thigh, hitting his femoral artery to give it a good shock and knocking him out too.

Walking into the target's room, which is plainly furnished but loaded with computer equipment, equipment that you'd never find in an ordinary civilian home, I align the target's face with my pistol's iron sights.

"The PM dossier. Hand it over," I demand quietly.

The target, a middle-aged Caucasian man with glasses, gives me a wry smile. It's as if he's grown accustomed to being held at gunpoint.

"That's all you want? Sure, I guess."

He rummages through his bottom desk drawer and tosses the dossier file like a frisbee to me, which I catch.

"Not sure why you'd want that for, but tell your client, whoever they are, they ain't gonna do what they wanna do with it."


	7. The Pentagon

The Super Huey touches down with a stable but abrupt bump against the ground, and FAL, Spas, Welrod, Grizzly, G36-C, and I all immediately disengage our safety belts and prepare to disembark. None of us dare speak a word, and I hold with slowly accumulating tension the dossier I confiscated from our target a day and a half ago in my left gloved hand.

A girl who looks about our ages - if we T-Dolls can be considered to have human ages - who's been sitting next to the righthand loading door gets up as soon as we land, takes hold of the safety handlebar next to the door, and gives us a quick glance and a grin. She's wearing a crimson red longcoat sashed around the waist by a large black belt, a uniform that gives her the impression that she could be a special attendee of a very important government ceremony somewhere that isn't related to United States political matters. And just before she speaks to us, she taps down the pair of large, circular glasses that she almost always wears on her scalp like a pair of goggles so that she can actually wear them properly for once.

"This is it, ladies!" Kalina barks at us cheerfully. No matter what the situation, she's always got a reason to smile, even if she doesn't really have one.

At her cue, all of us T-Dolls stand up from our seats and line up in single file, silently, after Kalina as the right loading door is opened up from the outside by a military policeman who's approached the helicopter swiftly as we landed. Kalina steps out first, and I, leading the rest of the T-Dolls, follow quickly.

"Your convoy is ready, ma'am!" the MP yells to us sternly over the beating of the Super Huey's main rotor blades that are still active. "Welcome to the Pentagon!"

The murky nighttime sky that's bleached over us, alleviated only slightly by the bright streetlamps all across the Pentagon grounds and from the various lights from the massive Pentagon complex itself, looms over us with its dreary clouds as we follow Kalina, unarmed, towards our waiting convoy sitting basically right next to our landing zone. Kalina turns around as she's walking to it, motioning for us to hurry up.

"We're late!" she informs us, and despite her usual smile, we sense a clear degree of urgency in her voice, so we comply. A suited Pentagon worker who's part of the our escort convoy crisply opens the passenger door of our limousine for Kalina, and we pile inside swiftly, with the same man closing the door after us to seat himself in the shotgun seat.

Once we're all seated, a U.S. Army general who's already inside the limousine with us, seated furthest away just behind the shotgun seat and the driver, eyes us silently, almost scornfully. This, thankfully, doesn't last for long, as someone else is already in the vehicle with us, someone who's more important to us at the moment: a woman uniformed identically to Kalina and sporting her most distinctive physical feature that is her large monocle over her right eye extends a hand to me, also giving me a nod of acknowledgement.

"Senior Officer Helianthus," I murmur respectfully, and we shake hands.

"As always, your reputation precedes you," Helianthus remarks. "Excellent work with the dossier."

I nod silently as the U.S. general orders the driver to proceed. The police motorcycles who've been tasked to escort our convoy turn on their sirens to clear the way, and our limousine, along with the others, get started driving us to the Pentagon. And as the U.S. Army general observes distantly and coldly, Helianthus rests her hands in her lap.

"Have you been told the situation yet?" Helianthus asks quietly in her Edinburgh accent.

"No, ma'am. We were summoned here on short notice," I reply sharply.

"I see. I don't have the clearance to brief you as I normally would at the moment."

No clearance to debrief us? That must be the same reason why I was told by Kalina not to hand her the dossier I have. As Senior Officer of G&K, Miss Helianthus worked as our senior mission control officer during the time of the Frontline, and because T-Dolls are property of G&K and are mandated to view all G&K staff as their direct superiors, by technicality all T-Dolls are Helianthus's subordinates. Therefore, had we not been summoned to the Pentagon and placed ourselves under American military supervision, I would have handed her this dossier immediately for her to see.

"Permission to request sitrep," I ask tersely, eyeing the general across from us.

"Again, no clearance. You will be briefed properly onsite," Helianthus says definitively, effectively ending our short-lived conversation. So we spend the rest of our time in our limousine in total silence as the motorcade drives to the Pentagon.

* * *

Once we reach the Pentagon, Helianthus, Kalina, and we six T-Dolls march discreetly inside, passing through multiple security clearance stations along the way. Every time we passed one, Kalina or Helianthus would administer a special passcode, unique to each security detail, upon which we would be let through while a suited man at each station whispered into their microphones, "The VIP's are here", or "they're here".

"Your first time at the Pentagon?" Kalina asks us T-Dolls cheerfully as always, but while I nod, the others don't, instead shaking their heads. "Hopefully you're hanging in there. The Pentagon's a pretty strict place."

"You don't say," FAL remarks sarcastically, and Kalina chuckles quietly too.

"You get used to it. And honestly it's not even that bad. You all only feel this way because we're under American military supervision."

"Supervision, huh..." Welrod uneasily eyes all the security cameras in the hall that we're walking down, with Helianthus leading us. "I thought bloody Yanks were supposed to be _anti-_ communist."

"Now, now, Welrod..."

Down the hall, there stand two suited guardsmen armed with stock M16-A1 rifles, and when Helianthus approaches them, she gives them the final passcode that will grant us access to this room.

"Prospero," she calmly inputs, and the guardsmen stand aside to let us in. Helianthus opens the door herself, and we all file in after her.

Once the door is closed behind us, we find ourselves in a dark room that's only illuminated in the center, where an oval table sits with exactly enough chairs to seat us all - plus one. That plus-one, clearly waiting for us while silently standing in the darkness to our upper right of the room, steps out of said darkness and into the light, revealing himself and his tall, muscular stature over which he wears the same red longcoat as Kalina and Helianthus, only by simply donning it on his shoulders and not actually wearing it.

As soon as he makes himself seen, all six of us T-Dolls snap to attention to salute him as he walks to the table.

"At ease, ladies," Mr. Kryuger says gruffly in his thick Russian accent, waving us all to be seated at the table. "Come, there is much to discuss and not enough time to do it."

Swiftly complying, we sit down to join him, and sitting closest to Mr. Kryuger, I hand him the dossier, as previously directed. He accepts it silently and opens it up, browsing through its small amount of contents.

"Mmm...I see..." he murmurs slowly, and within a few brief minutes, he sets down the manila file that is the recovered dossier and looks at us with icy impunity. "With this, I can now authorize this mission."

Reaching into his inner jacket pocket (not his red longcoat, the business suit jacket that he wears as his actual attire for today), Mr. Kryuger produces a small black cube that he sets on the table and flicks halfway across so that it is in the center from everyone, and when it slides to a stop, it unpacks itself to reveal a tiny antenna that suddenly projects a solid beam of light straight up to the ceiling. This beam of light then structures itself into a globe, but not just any globe - a near perfect recreation of the Earth, rotating and revolving around the sun that we cannot see in this projection in real time.

"Two weeks ago, our partner company, Lukenstor Defense Systems, suffered massive cyber attack that compromised about 35% of its total database," Mr. Kryuger reveals. "For those of you who are unaware of Lukenstor, they are a secret sister company that provides us the means to maintain T-Dolls after the Frontline; they were also the same company that was responsible for T-Doll construction, and for their safety, they merged with G&K at the start of the Frontline so that the Sangvis Ferri could not locate them and strike at us where it would have damaged us the most.

"Currently we have Third and Fourth Echelons investigating the origin and the perpetrators of this cyber attack, but the attack was conducted in such a way that they are still having trouble tracking down those responsible, until earlier this week, when Lukenstor tipped off Third Echelon about a potential suspect that they'd found. They investigated the area until the time off your mission in order to prepare you adequately for it, and your mission was intended at first to neutralize the target and any witnesses. However, during the mission, Lukenstor confirmed that the suspect was Ken Simpson, a freelance coder, software engineer, and hacker who is very well known in the freelance software business for his skill and, in the underground hacking community, for his substantial hacking ability. Simpson is reported to be a very eclectic individual, and whatever he works on tends to be different from the rest of the work that others of similar backgrounds produce; therefore, I ordered Walter to secure this dossier and return it to me."

"What's the dossier about, sir?" Welrod asks.

Mr. Kryuger squints in an aggravated fashion.

"T-Doll tech," he hisses softly. "While I am not an expert on the subject as the Lukenstor scientists are, I have spent enough time with them and with T-Doll construction phases firsthand long enough for me to know that Simpson was tasked to attempt to reverse-engineer T-Dolls."

A strong silence grips the room, as if there wasn't one already. Grizzly clears her throat to ask a question.

"Even if they were to reverse-engineer us, wouldn't that be a waste of time? There's no company in the world that can construct T-Dolls," she points out.

"I would not be so sure," Mr. Kryuger shakes his head. "If we can possess the means to produce T-Dolls, other companies might be able to as well. The Sangvis Ferri was one example that thankfully does not exist anymore. However, the danger that another Sangvis Ferri, just under a different name, can exist may return."

"Besides, someone trying to reverse engineer T-Doll schematics is dangerous by itself," Helianthus adds. "Even if Simpson were not able to figure out exactly how to do so, there can always be others he can turn to for help in order to complete his objective, or to simply pass on the schematics to another group whom we have no idea about who _can_ begin manufacturing T-Dolls."

"Fourth Echelon has traced Simpson's electronic communications and have found the location of whoever or whatever he was speaking with the most for the past two weeks," Mr. Kryuger informs us, and the globe spins around slowly to show us a highlighted location in Germany: the city of Cologne. "First Echelon, you are to travel to Cologne and track down this target. Identify the target and obtain as much information as you can from them and/or about them as possible and report to G&K about your data within seventy-two hours. In the meantime, the rest of you, you will be rerouted to G&K HQ for further instructions."


	8. Staging Point

"Whew."

Letting out a somewhat tired sigh, I set down my duffel bag containing what few possessions I have to my name onto a long, thin wooden bench. I've just landed at the Youngstown-Warren Air Reserve Station located in Vienna, Ohio, which is the home of the United States' 910th Airlift Wing and, as of six months ago, G&K's main operational headquarters on United States territory.

Technically, G&K's primary headquarters is supposed to be in the Pentagon, from where I've just flown in with FAL, who's making her rounds of greeting the airmen on duty right now since she's the sociable type and likes getting to know people in the bases that she's in. While Kalina, Helianthus, and Mr. Kryuger do indeed work at the Pentagon from time to time, those are more or less on official business, whenever they need to deal with the bureaucracy known as the United States government and the United States military. Where they actually conduct business directly related to T-Doll operations around the world is here, at this Air Reserve base, because an Air Reserve base isn't typically where people would expect a primary operations base for an army of modern military battle android mercenaries would be located. It's also quite convenient to be based out of an Air Reserve base, since it means that the 910th Air Wing and the airmen on duty can provide transport whenever we need it; in fact, they're under strict orders to do so. In exchange, if there are T-Dolls stationed here, they help out around the base with moving supplies whenever the need arises and assist with fresh military helicopter pilot recruits training to become fully-fledged helicopter pilots.

Plus, the high security levels of an American military base helps considerably in giving us some space to ourselves. You'd be surprised how convenient it is having a space to ourselves - while our actual physical base within the Air Reserve base isn't large at all, just a few old buildings that the base gave us to use that we refurbished on our own into dorms and offices, it's precious space in which we're not being constantly monitored or in the presence of ordinary humans where having idle chatter with other T-Dolls might raise a few eyebrows if we're overheard. You might think this social aspect shouldn't be too big of a deal, and you'd be right, it shouldn't, but the inconvenient truth of the matter is that we T-Dolls have been built modeled after real human beings, to ultimately behave like them, so we have more or less the same social needs and problems as they do. If we didn't, we wouldn't have to worry about T-Dolls like Thompson developing personality codex decay.

This particular room I'm in is our locker room, which used to be the base's, naturally. It's quite big to be a locker room; I've been in several American public school locker rooms because of where a few assignments in the past that I had ended up taking me, and ours is about the size of three standard high school locker rooms put together, more or less. It wasn't this big originally; we T-Dolls who'd come here first to get stationed here for the first time decided by ourselves that it might be a good idea to expand the locker room, and we got both the base's and Mr. Kryuger's permission to expand the building. The thinking was that it'd be best to prepare for a situation in which a lot of T-Dolls would be stationed here at the Air Reserve base at a time in case we have some major operations, but so far it hasn't been used to its fullest potential. So as I open my locker by putting my hand on its biometric scanner and open up my duffel bag to shovel my possessions in, which basically consists of not much more than my fake violin case containing my sniper rifle and handguns, gun cleaning kits and materials, some spare boxes of ammunition, packs of cigarettes both opened and unopened, and a small bottle of half-drunk Jack Daniel's, the noises I make echo through the mostly empty locker room.

As I slowly place my possessions one at a time inside my locker, making sure to arrange things nicely and tidily now that I have a small luxury of time to do so, I silently ponder my currently assigned mission. So two weeks ago, our sister company Lukenstor Defense Systems, or LDS for short, was hit by a cyber attack that compromised about 35% of their database, which then led to our tracking down of Ken Simpson, a freelance techie with a specialty in hacking who's been confirmed to have been trying to reverse-engineer what data he had on him at the time. Fourth Echelon was able to backtrace his comms to a contact in Cologne, Germany, to where I'll be deploying in about two hours from now.

There's a few questions I have about this situation, though. Lukenstor is a very secret company; only a select few high-ranking officials in the American government and military are aware of their existence, and this includes Kalina, Helianthus, and Mr. Kryuger. You can't just Google Lukenstor; nothing'll show up. And the Girl's Frontline itself was a very secret war that somehow has been able to evade the public eye and media, in no small thanks to the cleanup work that the American government and other governments of countries where the conflicts of the Frontline have erupted had done to keep things quiet. So the natural conclusion here would be to assume that whoever launched that cyber attack against Lukenstor is either a former Sangvis Ferri executive or commander or a former Sangvis Ferri operative herself, which would be the most sensible culprits, but that would beg the question of how they managed to even locate where Lukenstor is in the first place. Even I don't know exactly where Lukenstor is located; for their own safety, if we ever need to undergo reconstructive surgery or receive some badly needed software maintenance, we get deactivated first, then shipped off to Lukenstor's headquarters to receive treatment, and then return back here to the Air Reserve Base, where we then get reactivated and redeployed wherever needed. So if even we T-Doll's don't know, how could a Sangvis Ferri know? And it's not like any of our own executive officers got captured by the Sangvis Ferri during the Frontline, unless for whatever reason either Kalina, Helianthus, or Mr. Kryuger themselves are somehow behind this, but there's simply no evidence for that this early into the assignment.

I sigh to myself again; I'll have to hope that I'll get the answer to this first problem when we get to Cologne and track down our target. My experience with these kinds of assignments tells me that whoever/whatever we'll meet in Cologne will not actually be the main perpetrator, but rather we'll find ourselves chasing a goddamn rabbit trail that could go in any of a hundred different directions.

The next question I have is how some random hacker's been able to decode T-Doll software. From my understanding, our software and coding is written and constructed in a totally unique programming language, one that was apparently invented specifically for use for T-Doll construction, and that, along with everything else Lukenstor has produced, is supposed to be of utmost secrecy. It's the type of thing where it shouldn't matter how talented of a hacker you are, you shouldn't be able to hack something you're totally unfamiliar with. Hacking works because the hacker is already familiar with whatever operating system or code is being used - so some random hacker from the Bay Area shouldn't have been able to figure out our programming language, much less start reverse-engineering T-Doll tech. Again, this may or may not be answered when we arrive in Cologne and track down our target.

And the last question I have is in regards to Simpson's words to me, when I took the dossier from him. "Not sure why you'd want that for, but tell your client, whoever they are, they ain't gonna do what they wanna do with it"? What the hell's that supposed to mean? Client? I suppose in that assignment, Lukenstor was technically my client, which is a bit weird to consider. And if they're whom Simpson was referring to, that would imply that Lukenstor's up to some fishy business here. But how would Simpson have known that I was a T-Doll, and that I was working on behalf of Lukenstor, I suppose in this case? No, wait, he might've known - if he's been reverse-engineering T-Doll technology, then he should have known that I was a T-Doll myself. And he probably would've known that at some point, he'd be found out and tracked down by us T-Dolls to recover whatever data he had on him - which, by the way, after I'd taken the dossier from him, the rest of the girls arrived and destroyed all the equipment he had in his apartment to make sure he wasn't able to keep any of the data he might've had. Of course, that won't stop him from getting more equipment and getting whatever data he had gotten in the first place back, but by now his place is now rigged with surveillance equipment, with his phone line tapped and his bandwidth monitored so that he can't do anything from the convenience of his own home without G&K knowing. Even if he leaves his house to go do his work elsewhere, G&K's already hired private investigators to monitor his activity around the clock.

So assuming that Simpson was indeed referring to Lukenstor as my "client", what the hell did he mean by "they ain't gonna do what they wanna do with it"? That could mean such a myriad of things that I don't even know where to start. I wanted to bring it up with Mr. Kryuger, but he was very busy and I had to leave immediately for the Air Reserve Base to rendezvous with the rest of the Demon Hunters for this assignment, so I left him an email which he hasn't replied to yet. What worries me is that I myself, or any other T-Doll, for that matter, knows next to nothing about Lukenstor other than what they do for us, so I can't help but postulate the possibility that maybe Simpson knows something we don't about Lukenstor, and that something's up with them that might not be for the best.

I suppose I'm a bit special in this sense, but I do know that the head of Lukenstor's operations is a woman named Persica, a girl who looks like she's barely legal and has pink hair with cat ears of all things (that look legitimately real, scarily enough) and is evidently the one responsible for T-Doll maintenance and outfitting, not in the strictly weapons and equipment sense but more in terms of providing us T-Dolls with prosthetics, software upgrades, and the like. I've met her only once, and it was shortly after my initial indoctrination into First Echelon as a Demon Hunter. We weren't able to talk for long, but she said that I needed to make sure I never knew about her, and that she never existed as far as I was concerned, and that if I gave away her identity at any point, she'd know and she'd decommission me immediately. Given who she supposedly is, I haven't felt any need to disobey so far, and that continues to be my intention.

Maybe I should try to contact Persica about this situation? Obviously I can't call her exactly _trustworthy_ , but having information from what should be a reliable source should give me a better idea of what's going on. I guess I should start by figuring out how the hell I'm going to contact her in the first place, and I don't know how long _that'll_ take.

Having been steadily packing my things into my locker, I turn to my almost empty duffel bag to grab the final item that needs stashing, my almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. I'll need to clean it and refill it again soon.

I didn't know you for very long, M16, but for what it's worth, since we never found your dogtags, I still have the bottle you left behind.

As I'm setting the bottle inside my locker, the door to the locker room opens, breaking the silence inside suddenly, and the amount of noise generated from the old creaking doors would be enough to scare anyone unused to the enormously lonely silence that usually suffocates the atmosphere inside. I check my sensors to see if I recognize the person walking by, and when I do, she steps by right into my view when I turn to see her myself. It seems like she's also sensed my presence here and stops on my aisle to confirm who it is that she's sensed with her own eyes, just like me. Upon seeing me, she lets her face break into a surprised smile and dashes up to me, throwing herself into my own outstretched arms.

"Walther!" OBR cries out.


	9. Prototype

My relationship with OBR, as with any other relationship I carry with any other T-Doll I happen to know more than just by name, is complicated. No, that's wrong, my relationship with her isn't the one that's complicated, it's OBR and how she's come to be and how we met that's complicated.

OBR is one of the few T-Dolls who wasn't actually constructed a T-Doll. Instead, she's what other T-Dolls refer to as "organics", a semi-derogatory term developed by us to quickly denote any T-Doll who'd voluntarily - or involuntarily, didn't matter - given up their bodies to become prototype T-Dolls, providing invaluable data and experience to Lukenstor and its staff who would later use that experience to build the rest of us T-Dolls. As a result, they aren't truly human, but they aren't truly T-Dolls either; they're some...nightmarish hybridization of the two entities, and they can't truly be called one or the other, which makes them, by technicality I suppose, the world's only legitimate and functioning full-body cyborgs.

See, we T-Dolls are constructed using a top-secret material known as "Smartsteel"; think of it as a form of biosteel, but fully programmed and designed to mimic the construct of a human body as accurately as possible while enabling the body to be capable of peripheral and processing power on par with military-grade computers. Therefore, the idea behind the advantage of using T-Dolls is that you are able to wield the power of an elite company of fighting androids who have the precision, accuracy, speed, and power of machines but also have the endurance, willpower, and cognitive capacity of human beings. Naturally there are downsides to T-Dolls, as there are to all things, but it was clear that in order to combat the threat of Sangvis Ferri armies, fire needed to be fought with fire.

This does not apply to prototype T-Dolls, the so-called "organics"...well, not to the same extent. From what OBR's told me in the past when I first got to know her during the last few months of the Frontline, because she had a human body at the start, they needed to convert her body into one that would mimic what a final product of a T-Doll would look like, to Lukenstor's staff's eyes; evidently it was both easier and cheaper for them to develop drugs and surgical techniques that would turn a human being into a prototype T-Doll and use them for testing and data gathering than it was to build themselves a T-Doll from scratch without any prior experience or data and then risk having to scrap it because of mistakes that would inevitably be made along the way.

But the surgeries were horrific and painful, as you'd probably expect: they injected her with countless doses of some kind of serum called Rebirth, which is a terrifically morbid name, and this is coming from someone like me whose only enjoyable pastimes are drinking Jack Daniel's and smoking cigarettes. During the week or so that the serum doses needed to forcibly convert her body into that of a T-Doll, or a mimicry of one, OBR recalled that it was like being trapped in a burning apartment building and being unable to escape, but also unable to die, and the pain was coming from the inside out, not the other way around; during the first day alone, she tried killing herself to end the pain by slamming her wrists against a desk edge repeatedly to rupture her veins, and when the scientists and guardsmen on duty at the time managed to restrain her and strap her down to a confinement bed, she attempted again by biting her tongue to make it bleed and drown in her own blood, so they had to keep her mouth pried open so she wouldn't do that either, and then she tried holding her breath manually to suffocate herself to death in one final bid to off herself for good, and they had to install a mechanical diaphragm to force her to breathe.

All this, from someone who had initially come to Lukenstor's labs as a meek, abused girl who wanted nothing more than a small bedroom and a few blankets that she could use as a bed to sleep comfortably in.

And that was just the start - remember the "inevitable mistakes" I mentioned in the name of developing the know-how to build a T-Doll perfectly? Those mistakes still needed to be made somewhere, so naturally OBR and the rest of her organic comrades took those mistakes for the rest of us. For a full month, she and the others were subjected to weeks of constant injections that made them feel like they were burning alive underneath their own skins, though if OBR's to be believed, she slowly grew accustomed to that pain; she's also a girl who's very prone to trying to hide her problems and feelings if she's put on the spot, so naturally I'm not very inclined to believe her.

That month's worth of injections finally produced prototype T-Dolls out of OBR and the others, but at the heavy cost of their own identities. The pain associated with the development that OBR experienced isn't coincidental; the serum was turning her body's cells into Smartsteel, and one of the scientists whom OBR talked to after the fact even described the process bluntly as "the serum ate you from the inside out and shit out Smartsteel cells where it ate them" or something like that. Therefore, when the serums reached their brains, it did the same thing, effectively erasing their identities and memories that they had pre-development. The staff did make sure to interview the organics before they underwent the treatments, recording the most important things like name, family if they had any, fondest memories if they had any, etc., and they did make sure to warn the girls that they would most likely have their memories altered or even lost as a result of the treatments, and afterwards, they tried their best to rehabilitate them back into their old identities. Some took back to them comfortably, mainly because it was thought that their bodies were able to handle the transformation process better than the others, but OBR wasn't one of them. So she knows her real name and what her situation was before development, but to this day, she considers "OBR" to be her true name.

Long story short, it's thanks to them that the rest of us T-Dolls were able to be constructed. For months after their ultimate transformation into prototype T-Dolls, they trained and trained and trained, giving Lukenstor staff the precious data and experience they needed to go into full-fledged T-Doll production with minimal risk for failure and thus minimize lost resources, funds, and most importantly, time. Even when we T-Dolls were constructed, outfitted, and deployed to fight the Sangvis Ferri, the prototype T-Dolls remained in Lukenstor labs, continuing to conduct tests for the staff so that they could continuously update our systems with the latest combat data, tech, equipment, and tactics for the Frontline. This is why sometimes OBR sometimes awkwardly refers to the tests and training that she and the other organics did for Lukenstor and G&K the "Backline".

Fast-forward two years, and as with the rest of us T-Dolls, the prototypes were given the choice of either readjusting back into civilian life or staying on with G&K to now serve properly as functioning T-Doll units. Naturally, all of the prototypes chose to both stay on and become indoctrinated into G&K's mercenary T-Doll ranks, which was possible thanks to Lukenstor's development of powerful simulation software that invalidated the need for physical test subjects like the prototypes.

When I'd asked her why she in particular chose to stay on with us and become an active mercenary, OBR said that it wasn't specifically because she _wanted_ to stay with us, but rather because she didn't want to go back to the life she'd apparently had. Once she became OBR, she'd been told what her life was like before she came to their facilities: her father was a once decent company manager who fell into severe gambling and had hidden his addiction from his wife and his then-seventeen-year-old daughter for years. He had to keep borrowing money to cover up his huge gambling expenses, and eventually it got to the point where he was borrowing from shady loan sharks who, upon his inability to pay off his debts, threatened to liquidize his property, then daughter if he couldn't come up with the money. Despite his best efforts to beg from his friends and extended family, who'd already lent him money and knew about his nonexistent credit, he wasn't able to meet his quota, and so the loan sharks sent gang members to his house who broke in during the middle of the night, broke both of his legs and beat him half to death, and then gang-raped both his wife and daughter right in front of him before abducting both of them, leaving him with a final ultimatum to pay off what he owed at the threat of losing his family altogether.

It was Kalina who found OBR's father, apparently, since Kalina herself was working as a mercenary-for-hire at the time under G&K, before the time of T-Dolls, since, by some unnerving coincidence, was hunting down the same loan sharks whom OBR's father had borrowed money from. When she'd found him, he'd reached the kitchen and was about to slit his wrists (like father, like daughter), and in an effort to keep him alive so that she could follow the gang members' trails, she made him a deal that she'd go find his daughter and wife. But because that was around the same time that Lukenstor decided they needed to use human test subjects for T-Doll development and she was privy to it thanks to the fact that she and Persica worked closely together back then, Kalina would take his daughter back with her to Lukenstor for "testing". So he agreed, since it didn't cost him any money to make the deal. In the end, Kalina did recover his daughter, but she wasn't able to reach her in time to also save his wife, who ended up dying from abuse in captivity. And since Kalina only said she'd "find" his daughter and wife, not necessarily to bring them back alive, she took OBR back with her to Lukenstor anyway, despite the father's desperate pleas. She figured it'd be for the best for OBR anyway.

OBR doesn't know that Kalina was the one who saved her and took her to Lukenstor; Kalina said that she was so malnourished, dehydrated, and stressed from all the abuse that she'd been subjected to that she found her unconscious at the time of her rescue. She thought that the Lukenstor staff she'd woken up to on her first day there were more gang members coming to threaten her and abuse her. From a negligent father to a hostage situation and then to Lukenstor...even for a T-Doll like me who's been through a fair share of tough shit, it's hard to not cringe in internal pain knowing how terribly one girl's situation could turn in mere months.

I guess I ended up going on about her backstory and not actually explaining anything about our relationship. I first got to know her during my initial visit to Lukenstor's main facilities, during the same trip where I met Persica. I was waiting for my meeting with her and she wasn't in her office yet, so I decided to wait outside and watch a girl with a LaRue Tactical Optimized Battle Rifle conducting accuracy tests in the testing lab literally right across from Persica's office. Because I was recently indoctrinated as a Demon Hunter, I was quietly very proud of my title, like it was something I could keep to myself to know that I was more highly ranked in G&K's T-Doll echelons despite the grim truth and responsibility behind it. As I watched one of her tests, however, OBR shot 300 different targets that flipped up in her field of view in just over one hundred seconds, almost three shots per second. And when I asked Persica about that particular test, she told me that the test had not only used a completely randomized target acquisition pattern, but the training room had also blasted OBR with massive fans, also with randomized directions and strengths, to simulate heavy winds, showered her with water to simulate rain, and pumped sand into the room to simulate a sandstorm, all of these also on randomized patterns and strengths, and she didn't miss a target. And on a good day, she could have pulled that off in _less_ than a hundred seconds.

Naturally with someone as secretly prideful as me, and freshly promoted to the rank of Demon Hunter, I felt miffed seeing her performance. Of course, it was just training, and my own Walther 2000 isn't intended to be put under the same duress as her OBR, which is a much more modern rifle with the rugged reliability and insane accessorial flexibility of the AR-15 platform. So this shouldn't have annoyed me, but it did, so I went out of my way to go meet OBR in person so that I could find out which echelon she belonged to so that I could look up their combat records and keep tabs on it so I could always compare myself to them and prove to myself that I was still a superior sniper. I'd heard only rumors about prototype T-Dolls and the thought didn't cross my mind when I went to go meet her, and when I did, the fact that she was clearly uncomfortable with my constant talk of wartime performance made me remember that perhaps this was one of those "organic" T-Dolls that were mentioned in the past, so I apologized and introduced myself properly to her before getting to know her a little bit during what little time I had back then.

We kept contact throughout the rest of the Frontline sporadically, but it was only after the Frontline ended and we both happened to be stationed here at the Air Reserve Base in Vienna, Ohio when we met again. It was there and then that I first learned about her postwar intentions as a new mercenary under G&K: she wanted to help her father pay off his old debts, the very same debts that got him half-killed, his wife completely killed, and his daughter killed in an existential sense. She told me that Lukenstor had developed their simulation programs a handful of days before the official end of the Frontline, so OBR used her newfound freedom to go track down her father, with Kalina's help, appropriately enough, though for good reason Kalina didn't physically go with her. She found him living in a crude apartment in the middle of Las Vegas working, with brutal irony, as a blackjack dealer at the Mandalay Bay. He explained to her that he'd reformed following that disastrous time, and that he'd moved away from their old home in Chicago down to Las Vegas in hopes that the loan sharks wouldn't be able to track him down here, but unfortunately for him, they had. However, they didn't have the same ability to send gangsters or hire other criminals to go after him because he'd moved outside their areas of influence, and he wasn't worth the money and investment that they'd need to put into extorting him like the first time around, so they settled for another ultimatum that he would pay them a significant portion of his paycheck every month, now that he was back to working, and a single missed payment meant that they would have a hired gun in the area break into his house again and kill him off for good, forcing him to live in borderline poverty levels.

Unbelievably, despite the sins and the negligence that her father committed, OBR resolved to help him pay off his debts. Despite the fact that his gambling addiction, his unwillingness to share it with his family and seek help in overcoming it, and the hells that he put both OBR's mother and OBR herself through because of all of it, OBR somehow found it in her to decide that helping her father get back on the right track was the thing she wanted to do. She told me that she wasn't sure what she would do when she met her father again, but upon meeting him in his apartment, she couldn't stand seeing her own father in that kind of pathetic state; and for what it was worth, her father also begged her not to involve herself with him anymore after all the bullshit he'd put her through, and that his debts were his own to pay and that he was determined to see it through on his own. He hadn't even expected his daughter to ever come back for him in the first place, having convinced himself that no daughter would ever come back searching for a father like him after a catastrophe like that, but OBR did so anyway.

Naturally, I questioned her about this decision. I understood that perhaps this wasn't any of my business, and that I wasn't going to comment on the more private aspects of her situation like family and whatnot, but what I could and did question her on was from our side of the story, about how OBR lost her initial identity and became OBR. She said that even though she couldn't necessarily remember anything from the time that she'd spent with him pre-development, the fact that she still had someone whom she could call "father" or "dad" as if she were a regular human being was all she needed. As a prototype T-Doll, she's seen dozens, hundreds of T-Dolls produced, borne from the testing, knowledge, and experience that Lukenstor was able to glean off the sacrifice and work that she and the other prototype T-Dolls yielded, over the course of the Frontline. She's heard of the stories of T-Dolls who've formed strong bonds with their comrades over the course of the war, and the psychological nightmares that come of them when close friends and comrades die as a result of war. She personally feels blessed that she even has that exceedingly rare privilege off a T-Doll to be able to have someone known as a father to them, even if that father is ultimately the reason why she's in the situation that she's in now. She admitted that maybe if her father clearly hadn't reformed himself and was going back to gambling, she would have had a much harder time justifying helping him pay off the rest of his debts, but because he'd proved himself to her, OBR easily made the choice to help him.

So now, OBR works as a G&K mercenary and sends her entire income to her father to alleviate his debt, one paycheck at a time; she keeps none of it to herself. Kalina, who's in charge of paying us T-Dolls when we complete our contracts, is aware of this and has told G&K's armories and inventory staffs to let her access company equipment and supplies free of charge when normally there would be a small fee for the rest of us if we wanted to equip ourselves with something more than our default inventories. OBR's even noticed this herself and wonders why she gets to access surplus company equipment for free, even saying that she wants to pay for her equipment like everybody else. So devoted is she to freeing her father of debt that she's even wired his phone to automatically redirect calls from the loan sharks to her own phone so that her father doesn't have to deal with them yelling at him with constant threats every day, and even more bewildering is that _she answers every single one of them_ , assuring them that they'll have their money soon enough, presumably so that, again, her father doesn't have to appease them himself. Even her clothes, which consist of navy hot pants, a white bikini bottom with a matching white bikini top, a brown school uniform-esque blazer, black leggings, and standard combat boots are, minus the boots, blazer, and leggings, holdovers from her time as a hostage, when she'd been forced to wear that for the amusement of her captors at the time. OBR says that she's kept the same style of clothes so that she can more easily operate in urban environments, but that's a rather weak excuse - and having spoken with Kalina on my own, she and I believe it's more because those clothes were what she spent her development weeks in and she just isn't willing to try anything else since she's not familiar with them.

Ever since the beginnings of our careers as G&K T-Doll mercenaries, OBR and I have worked closely together on many occasions because it turns out our operational styles complement each other perfectly; in fact, our very first assignments were tied to the same mission. OBR is trained as a reactionary and high-fire rate sniper and excels in densely packed urban environments, but she doesn't have quite the long-range precision, patience, and live combat experience that I do, so in those duties she acts as my spotter and can quickly acquire me targets for me to take down. Not only that, but we both don't mind engaging directly in close-quarters combat whenever we feel like we need to, so we make for a excellent pair that naturally gravitates towards similar plans of action without any over-stepping of our respective responsibilities.

Needless to say, as we exchange our little secret handshake in the form of a modified version of patty-cake which ends in a sharp but strong high-five, I'm very glad to see her again.


	10. Häagen-Dazs

"A mission to Germany, huh...that's pretty far, for the jobs you've been handling lately." OBR ponders briefly, tossing me a can of Heineken from a small fridge in the corner of her office. It's not _her_ office, per se, but as OBR is evidently the only T-Doll on site, she's been handling whatever logistical matters concerns our little corner of the Air Reserve base.

"It is. Honestly, I was a bit surprised by it myself," I nod back, cracking open a cold one with OBR, though OBR, being the good girl that she is, declines to join me in consuming alcohol and instead twists open a small bottle of cherry Coca-Cola. I've taken a seat in front of her desk in a dinky little plastic folding chair while she resumes her own seat behind the desk, in a slightly upgraded option of an armless swivel chair. "And by the way, I hope Colt doesn't see you with that."

OBR laughs heartily. "You wanna know something funny? She was actually here for a day last week; she needed a day's rest before going off to another assignment over in Montana."

"Layover?"

"Yeah. I gave her a Coke can from the fridge, just a regular one." She motions over to the small fridge from which she's produced our drinkable goods.

"But'cha just couldn't show her the cherry one, huh."

"It's my favorite. I can't let Colt see it, or else it'll be gone the instant I turn my back to the fridge."

"Actually, I thought just regular Coke was her favorite?"

"Only because it's the most common. But she'll kill for any variety, especially when she's been binging on nothing but regular for more than a week."

"Sorry that you have to put up with her, haha."

"Nah, not at all, it means I get to snag a Coke or two off her every time she shows up."

We pause to each take a swig of our drinks.

"And it's not like I can just walk off site to go pick up a six pack or something, either," OBR sighs, typing rapidly on a laptop that's angled so that she and I can still talk normally.

"But I thought you could walk around whenever. It's not like the base's rules apply to us."

"Well, it's not because I can't. It's just..." OBR awkwardly glances down at herself.

"You walk all around base like that, though."

"Y-Yeah, but...everyone here knows me, and vice versa. I feel comfortable here, but outside the base it's..."

"Then just pull your blazer up. Shouldn't be a big deal. You have it for a reason, right?"

"...I think I'm more comfortable just asking the quartermaster to go get us stuff..."

I set down my can of Heineken. "You been takin' care of yourself here? I don't think you've had an assignment for a while now."

"Oh yeah, I've been fine. Do you miss the times when we'd deploy together?"

"Sometimes..." I sigh quietly, closing my eyes and leaning back in my chair. Well, more like slumping a little in it. "...I think about it sometimes."

OBR smiles just a little bit; it feels like a smile that she wants to hide, but the sheer happiness she feels is causing the smile to leak out somewhat.

"Yeah...I think about it sometimes too. Those days were fun."

"Not sure if I'd call them 'fun', necessarily..."

"But you get what I mean."

I sip on my Heineken again, reminiscing about our assignments together.

"BASE jumping out of a hundred plus story skyscrapers, busting narcotics rings, car chases with drug lords and drug dealers, and nonstop visits to every 7-11 and gas station store along the way."

OBR nods, smiling wide this time. "Those were fun, yeah. Now it's just writing reports and making sure this place doesn't run itself into the ground without anyone."

"Hm, I guess getting out there is better than staying holed up here."

"It's not _that_ bad. But yeah, others would stop by every now and then and we'd talk about what they've been up to, and it kinda makes me wish I'd get deployed too on something."

"You're good enough, you know? Just ask Kalina to get you hooked up. You could make a bit more cash that way too. In fact, I'm surprised you haven't been more proactive in that."

"Well, I did ask Kalina, but she told me that she really needed me here since I was the only readily available T-Doll at hand at the time that she asked me. If she didn't have to go back and forth from DC, she wouldn't've minded giving me my own assignment since she'd be able to look after this place on her own."

"Not to mention, but everyone else's taking all your assignments, since they've all been taking up more and more while you've just been stuck here. Like they're all off buildin' their own reps and paychecks while you get to sit here and watching everyone else take your work."

"Ehhh, it's fine, though. I'm not so bothered by it."

"If you say so..."

"How about you? How've the last few gone so far?" OBR asks in kind as I chug the rest of my Heineken.

"All of them were bad ones, well, except for the last one, but excluding that, they weren't that great. All I did was hunt down some more baddies who had a basement where they were cooking meth and some other shit in there, and they tried making it look like the inside of a goddamn saloon or something to cover it up, so that it wouldn't be found out as easily. Too bad they never thought to think to themselves and go 'but won't a saloon make us even _more_ obvious'..."

"So this job's gonna be a nice change of pace for you?"

"Hopefully. If it weren't for the fact that my client for that was paying me really well for that, I would've been offended."

OBR chuckles, typing at her laptop while taking a swig from her cherry Coke.

"You're still at the top of our leaderboards, right? In cash earned."

"And I plan to keep it that way."

Suddenly, the door to the relatively small and cozy office opens. OBR, who doesn't have quite the level of electronic peripherals that normal T-Dolls do, looks up in surprise at the unexpected visitor, while I just sigh again and finish the rest of my Heineken.

"Not if I have anything to say about it ~ " DSR-50 coos over at me as she sets her own bag down next to the doorway to head over to me and give me a hug from behind. "I just need another two months, and I'll be the new top mercenary in G&K."

I can't help but feel a bit irritated as she gives me a hug, since I can feel her enormous boobs press against the top of my back first, but it's hard to stay irritated when her arms tighten softly against my own chest and I feel DSR nuzzle her lips against the top of my head.

"Why're you so late, DSR?" I ask, feigning annoyance and looking straight up at DSR's face upside down. "You were supposed to be here like twenty mikes ago."

"Bad traveling weather. What else would it be? It's not as if us T-Dolls are the ones being late, either."

"I heard on the news that the weather's been bad for flights these days..." OBR adds.

"Yeah, it's been a bit on the rougher sides of things. I've been jammed up a couple of times in the past few weeks," I confirm to vouch for DSR before turning to her. She's a very tall girl, at least by T-Doll standards, standing at five foot ten, or around 178cm; she's easily the tallest Demon Hunter that G&K has, and for good reason, given the rifle she carries. She has her usual uniform on: the gray, black, and red pleated skirt, blouse, and necktie topped off by her small black plain beret and her black half-cape with a red interior. It also seems like she still hasn't given up her style of leggings, essentially wearing only one on her right and leaving her left leg coverless, exposed in all its vain beauty to the eyes of onlooking men and women alike. So many things that I can take fault with when it comes to her uniform...but the one thing that I secretly kind of wish I had too is that cape. God, it looks so cool, especially on someone like DSR who has that mature, femme fatale atmosphere to her...I could probably never pull off that cape as well as she can, as much as it pains me to admit. "How was Milwaukee?"

"Effortless. My assignment couldn't have gone better; it's the reason why I'm able to join everyone for our next assignment," DSR smiles warmly down at me. Even her moderate German accent is enticing; many T-Dolls, not just me, have made the accusation to DSR that she'll cause people to think that having a German accent is much sexier than it really is from most people, which she always gets a good laugh out of. Unlike me, since I don't speak with any accent whatsoever, though I do speak fluent German as part of my T-Doll identity. "I presume the others haven't arrived yet?"

"No, we're still waiting for them."

"And I don't imagine you have been here long?"

"Nuh-uh, just got here like half an hour ago."

"Very good, then I'll go put away my things. But first, Walther, I have something for youuuuu ~ "

As I turn around to face her again to see what she's talking about, DSR reaches into her pocket.

"Ta-da ~ ! Your absolute favorite!" DSR proclaims cheerfully, and on her palm sits what is indeed my absolute favorite food in the world, a cup of chocolate Häagen-Dazs ice cream; she's even brought me a little wooden eating spoon that rides on top of the ice cream cup's lid.

"Y-You didn't have to go out of your way to get this for me, I could've gotten one for myself...!" I stammer, unable to stop the blood in my face from rushing straight to my cheeks out of embarrassment; DSR is one of quite a few other T-Dolls who know my weakness to chocolate ice cream and therefore use it as a way to tease me, though in most cases such as this they're more or less benign and end with me getting more chocolate ice cream, which I'll never object to.

"Now, now, Walther, we all know that you're too busy taking your assignments seriously to go out there and buy some ice cream for yourself," DSR corrects me, practically shoving the ice cream into my hands. "But besides, a good girl like you shouldn't be smoking and drinking so much. You haven't been doing too much of either these days, I hope?"

"Er - y-yeah, no, I uh - " I stammer even harder, making DSR pout since it's obvious that I'm trying to hide the truth.

"That's no good...we need you to take better care of yourself as our echelon leader. Being a T-Doll doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of your body," DSR frowns a little, like she's a mother gently reprimanding her child.

"...old habits die hard, what else can I say..." I murmur, opening up the chocolate ice cream that DSR's gotten me. The clean, smooth surface of the firm, heavenly brown ice cream awaits my spoon as it's exposed to the office's lights above. DSR leans in a little to whisper almost silently in German,

"I've said this before, but please don't drink and smoke too much...you'll let your beautiful looks go to waste."

She quickly draws back as if she hasn't said anything to announce, "And with that done, I'll be off ~ you know where to find me."

And just as swiftly as she's entered, DSR elegantly exits, leaving me in my seat still savoring each and every bite of precious chocolate ice cream like it's my last and OBR behind her desk as she closes her laptop, having finished whatever work she had on there.

"For DSR to be here too for the same assignment..." OBR murmurs, glancing over at me cautiously. "Is this another Hunt?"

Hunt is the phrase T-Dolls use to describe assignments given only to First Echelon, or the Demon Hunters.

I nod quietly. "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but honestly I don't think it matters since you already know about us. I just can't tell you the details of what we're doing, though..."

"Fair enough. Just make sure not to drink too much while you're in Germany."

"Oh c'mon, what's with you and DSR always warning me not to drink so much," I pout back at my fellow rifle T-Doll.

OBR scratches the back of her head awkwardly. "Well...every time you stop by here, you always leave an empty bottle of something, usually Jack, that I have to clean up. I didn't think much about it at first, but then I asked Kalina just nonchalantly about it, and she said that there's a chance that you might have a drinking problem..."

"It's not a _problem_. It's a hobby, I don't know why everyone keeps thinking I drink myself to sleep every night," I retort while the wooden spoon is still in my lips. Little does OBR know, that's something that I actually _have_ done on more than one occasion.


	11. First Echelon

Before the strike of midnight, I sit at the edge of a desk in a dimly lit room that used to be an equipment storage room for the base that was given to us along with the other few buildings for us T-Dolls to use. Four other T-Dolls are with me in the same room, all seated in miscellaneous positions around the room, though for the most part we sit in close proximity to one another.

DSR-Precision GmbH DSR-50 - the second-in-command of First Echelon, and the resident anti-materiel and explosives specialist. With her own little catchphrase of "Let's get dangerous!" that she utters whenever she's feeling particularly trigger-happy, she loves nothing more than putting her own life on the line in pursuit of an objective, so the more dangerous the assignment, the more enjoyment she'll derive from it when undertaking it. Perhaps logically, her favorite pastime outside of combat operations and other mercenary-related duties is gambling, since that's the closest thing she can get to the feeling of risking everything for the sweet taste of victory in the face of all odds. To her credit, though, she _is_ a responsible gambler, unlike someone's father. And also not surprisingly, she naturally gravitates towards big guns and big damage; initially she was issued a standard DSR-1 sniper rifle upon her first deployment during the Frontline, but after a few weeks of service with it, while she had no real qualms with the rifle's performance, she wanted a bigger bullet, and thus a bigger rifle - and so they issued her its 50-caliber variant, and the rest is history. She loves being able to sow the seeds of destruction and chaos and reaping it when the time is just right in order to cause maximum havoc, and sometimes I think she really does love nothing more than seeing the whole world burn from mass explosions from the times I've seen her in combat.

Speaking of someone who loves seeing the whole world burn, KRISS Vector, the resident improvised equipment specialist, urban and guerrilla warfare specialist, and secondary explosives specialist, after DSR-50, because why have only one explosives expert on your team when you can have two for 300% more explosions. Despite her demure and subdued appearance, amplified by her relatively short height, small body frame, and short platinum silver hair, Vector is easily the most unhinged out of anyone in First Echelon, though she's trained herself to keep her unhingedness under control outside of combat; the facts that her favorite piece of equipment is the Molotov cocktail and she carries AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenades on her utility belt on her waist in bulletproof cases should be very telling of this. And if she runs out of military incendiaries, she can always cook up homemade Molotov cocktails of her own to chuck at whatever she feels like burning. With one exception, Vector has seen more urban combat than everyone else in this echelon, thanks to her home unit during the Frontline that specialized in combating Sangvis Ferri threats in urban locations around the world, and to this day, if you visit the cities where Vector has been deployed to, you can sometimes still find scorch marks from the Molotovs and incendiaries she's thrown if the cities haven't been careful enough to clean them all up. And as such, she's also one of our best martial arts practitioners and is very capable with a wide array of personal melee weapons or anything that can be used like a potential melee weapon like knives, kukris, crowbars, 2x4's, shovels, and even smartphones, somehow. Of note, when she was first deployed, Vector was issued the prototype Gen-1 variant of the Vector SMG, which she fell in love with and has kept all this time through countless skirmishes, battles, weather conditions, and damages. Even when she was issued an upgraded Gen-2 Vector SMG, instead of retiring her Gen-1, Vector has chosen to field both of them at the same time - keeping her Gen-1 strapped tightly to her side to use as a secondary weapon while fielding her Gen-2 as her primary.

FN FAL is also a Kukri user, and she's so skilled with it that she can even dual-wield them if needed, a feat not even Vector can claim to pull off herself, so she's no slouch in CQC herself, not that anyone in First Echelon is, otherwise they wouldn't be on First Echelon in the first place. Her official specialty lies in precision shooting and crowd control, providing a level of small arms fire that snipers and submachine guns can't fulfill, and between her and Vector, the two of them can complement each other's covering fire and suppressive fire capabilities even though First Echelon doesn't have a machine gun. She also has equipped on her DSA-58 OSW variant an underbarreled M-203 grenade launcher to add even more firepower and crowd control ability. But more than that, her true specialty lies in coming up with strategies and battle plans on the fly, or in the middle of a battle; during the Frontline, she was in charge of her own echelon, which was aptly named after herself, where she commanded a squad of other FN-inspired T-Dolls, and she became renowned as one of G&K's most daring but spectacularly successful tacticians during the war. This was after she'd received ridicule from other T-Dolls who were spreading rumors about her at the time that she was a poorly performing T-Doll based off the results of her first couple months of deployment and that she cared more about civilian fashion and clothes than the actual war effort itself, and that her fashion tastes on top of it all weren't exactly the best either; her nickname amongst some T-Dolls who were willing to take the teasing this far was "Fucking Fail", a rather blunt interpretation of her weapon's initials. FAL was quite sensitive to people gossiping about her, from what I remember at the time, and she definitely didn't appreciate being called "Fucking Fail", so being able to prove herself in the field pretty much erased all the ridicule associated with her name. When she became a Demon Hunter and joined First Echelon, there was a period of time in which she demanded that she be in charge of First Echelon's strategizing and shot-calling, essentially asking to be First Echelon's leader as she was in her own echelon, but after a few assignments together, FAL found her niche as our field tactician, which is a fancy title that means that when shit hits the fan, she's the one who comes up with the best plans on what to do next. If DSR-50 or I come up with initial plans for an assignment, it's FAL who refines our plans, streamlines everything is done optimally and efficiently as possible, and comes up with contingency plans and backup strategies in case our Plan A falls through. I will say though, I do agree with the people who think FAL's fashion sense is a bit lacking, because even though it's improved ever since we T-Dolls become mercenaries and FAL's had the time and opportunities to visit fashion centers across America and Europe, she's still got a lot of room for improvement.

Franchi SPAS-12 is our heavy-duty, our vanguard. If it's not Vector, SPAS is the one getting her feet wet first, and in many situations where Vector just can't be the first one into a firefight, SPAS is there to take the first few hits. As a shotgun T-Doll and armed with the physical power and fortitude to do the title of Shotgun T-Doll justice, she's fearless, cold, and efficient; I've seen her kick a car down a street for a whole block in order to stop a getaway car in one of our early assignments together. Indeed, she was one of the shotguns on the ATLAS Shotgun Squad, an echelon made up of nothing but Shotgun T-Dolls who specialized in combating large groups of the Sangvis Ferri's mechanized infantry and armor, like the Aegis, Nemeum, Tarantulas, and Manticores. The constant frontline duty also put SPAS in situations where many T-Dolls have never been, one of which I alluded to in my conversation with Welrod the other day at the skyscraper in San Francisco, and she's outlasted horrors and stresses of the Frontline that would have easily broken many other T-Dolls. Correction: they _did_ break her, but she was strong enough to bounce back, but she needed a way to deal with the stress and trauma of war, which she found in eating. I don't know if it's her experiences in the Frontline that are the cause of this or if she was just built this way from the beginning, but SPAS possesses a shockingly darker side to her, one that only surfaces under very specific or very stressful circumstances, and the only way you could tell that she possessed this is if you paid close attention to the way she operates a fights: because ordinarily she's a ditzy, food-loving T-Doll who doesn't like to think too much and prefers just beating enemies over the head with her shield, her gun's stock, or her bare hands, which probably fits her job description to a tee, but when she gets into the action, she's anything but ditzy, always being efficient in everything that she does and never hesitating to do whatever it takes to get the job done. She is also, most surprisingly, the only T-Doll in First Echelon to possess her own human name, Sabrina Franchi. While T-Dolls typically don't care to use human names, since we all know we've been constructed as T-Dolls and the only names we need are the weapons we're associated with, SPAS was named as such when, as the story goes, one of the engineers from Franchi who'd worked on the weapon's development requested to meet SPAS-12 when she finished construction and asked to christen her as such. To this day SPAS doesn't know who that particular engineer was, as she'd never met them personally and was only told this after the fact when Kalina accidentally let her tongue slip and called her Sabrina, so one of her life goals is to meet the person who gave her a human name, an opportunity that hasn't yet come to pass. Sometimes we call her Sabrina to tease her, though it's clear that she's not quite sure how to react to being called as such, so we don't do it often lest she gets annoyed and starts shooting rubber rounds at us to shut us up.

And finally, me. Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen WA-2000, shortened to just Walther or WA2K, depending on your preference. I am the leader of First Echelon, the Demon Hunters. I am among the very best, if not _the_ very best, that G&K has to offer. Every theater of war that the Frontline has been fought, I have been there, even if no one knows about it. I've led dozens of echelons, even entire _companies_ of T-Dolls at some points during the war against the Sangvis Ferri, I can safely claim that if it were not for me at several key moments during the war, the Frontline would still be raging to this day, and who knows if the Frontline's existence would have been leaked to the public by then and made the situation exponentially worse. I'll admit that a good portion of my success has to be attributed to the fact that G&K and Lukenstor specifically developed me as one of their most capable and advanced T-Dolls, so I had high expectations to live up to within the chains of command, but the rest of it was my own hard work and ability. It's not to say that I am perfect, and in fact during my own first year of deployment I made many mistakes, some minor and many costly, but that year was the year that I worked to become the best that I knew I should be. And by becoming the leader of First Echelon, I cemented that status as the cream of the crop, the best of the best. Whenever we receive challenging assignments, the first question that is asked is, "Do we need to send in Walther?" And indeed, the most difficult jobs are left to me, because it's thought that I'm the only one who can reliably get those jobs done, and at times I am. You get what you pay for; I am the best, so I cost more.

I've seen many Demon Hunters come and go over the last few years ever since First Echelon's inception; some who fell in the line of duty, and others who succumbed to themselves and the tragedies of war.

This is a fact that I am always reminded of every time I look at the faces of those who hold this title, for I am the first Demon Hunter. And this fact will not change.

Looking at the faces of my squadmates, I hop off the edge of the desk that I've been sitting on.

"Enough chips, Spas. Let's get to work," I declare quietly, and SPAS quickly stashes her almost-empty bag of Lay's Baked Barbecue chips behind her on her seat.


End file.
